Ghosts
Author’s Revised Edition
By
Noel Hynd
Ghosts
Author’s New Revised Edition
by Noel Hynd
Digital ISBN:
978-1-61572-065-1
Print ISBN: 978-1-61572-064-4
Originally
published as ISBN 0-7394-4575-8
Cover art by: Ash Arceneaux
Edited
by: Andrea Heacock Reyes
Copyright
2010 Noel Hynd
Printed in the United States of America
Worldwide Electronic & Digital Rights
1st North American and
UK Print Rights
All rights
reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned or
distributed in any form, including digital and electronic or
mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information
storage and retrieval system, without the prior written consent of
the Publisher, except for brief quotes for use in reviews.
This book is a work of fiction. Characters, names, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Damnation
Books, LLC.
P.O. Box 3931
Santa Rosa, CA
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Author’s Note:
What follows is, of course, a novel, so certain fictional liberties have been taken-specifically with some of the geographic locations on the island of Nantucket, as well as, with the people of the island. Cort Street does not exist by that name, for example, nor do a pair of detectives-with-attitudes like Rodzienko and Gelman. The truth about haunted houses on the island, however, may be stranger than any novelist could imagine.
A note of special thanks is also in order to Mrs. Virginia Hillger, for many favors over the years, and to my good friend Kevin Foster, for his tireless efforts to turn Ghosts into a film. Thanks, also whomever the woman in white was who drifted through my summer residence several summers back and, in a ghostly way, inspired this book. May your spirit rest in peace.
This edition is a revision of my 1993 novel, written seventeen years ago. I’ve updated and tightened the story, or at least I hope I have. The book found several hundred thousand fans in its first edition. I hope it will be equally enthralling to a new audience, particularly via e-books, this time around. Even after so many years, my lasting gratitude goes to Wally Exman, the original editor of Ghosts, for his guidance through the original manuscript and for helping make the story as good as it is.
People tell me Ghosts is a scary book. That is what I intended. Feel free to read it late at night while you’re home alone, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Noel
Hynd
Culver City, California February 2010
You could get
lost delving into the
other side of life.
--St. Jude
Part One
The Discovery
Let every soul be subject unto the
higher powers.
--THE EPISTLE OF PAUL TO THE ROMANS
Chapter One
Reverend George Andrew Osaro glanced at his watch. It was five minutes past nine on the sweetly pleasant summer night of June 21, 2009. In the downstairs meeting hall of the Christ and Holy Trinity Lutheran Church on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts, Reverend Osaro moved the evening’s symposium toward its conclusion.
“I think we just have time for our last three stories,” he said, surveying his audience. “Why don’t we proceed?”
On this evening, the minister sat on a stage at the front of the crowded hall. He was a short, wiry man of half European ancestry and half Japanese. His short dark hair, clear fresh face, and big round glasses gave him an owlish look. He sat at the center of a long table, flanked by three panel participants on each side and glanced at two women and a man seated in chairs nearby. His left hand found his pipe, which had sat all evening on the table before him. His right hand found a tobacco pouch and as he spoke he deftly packed a briar with thumb and forefinger.
“Who wants to proceed? Mary?”
At the end of the table a woman named Mary Rovere nodded. “Spiritual Nantucket” was the topic of the evening. “Ghosts on Our Island” was the subtitle. The latter defined the event more concisely than the former. On a stage before an audience were seven people who had, as Osaro might have explained it, experienced the paranormal. Interacted with spirits. Or at least one spirit. Or, at least, they all thought they had. George Osaro was a maverick like that. He used church space to stage an evening of fascinating creepiness, an extravaganza delving into a possible existence other than this one. And why not? Osaro charged five dollars apiece to tourists and residents, put ads in the local papers and induced the radio stations on Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard to mention it as a public service. After all, it was a church benefit. He also put up posters on the supermarket bulletin boards and had now drawn one hundred and sixteen paying customers. Osaro might have made an excellent advance man for a gubernatorial candidate.
So what if this was small-time showbiz in a church hall? Reverend Osaro painlessly netted in excess of five hundred dollars for his parish. Nantucket was an old island rattling with new money, distant generations and creaking houses. If the distant generations and creaking houses could induce the tourists and summer people to redistribute some of that new money into his church’s coffers, was that such a crime?
Ghost.
A profanity in the minister’s presence would pass unnoticed. An obscenity would breeze past him as well. But “ghost” was one word Osaro disdained.
Spiritual: This was the term Reverend Osaro preferred. Ghosts, he argued, were shapeless white cartoon characters like Casper, or bad actors wearing white sheets in old Charlie Chan movies, or a double image on a television screen. Spirits, on the other hand, were those grand, buoyant, immeasurable, indefinable things that exist within all of us, only to be liberated after one’s earthly demise. Sometimes they hung around for a while on their way “somewhere else.” That was what the good minister said. And that’s what this evening was about. Well, it was his theory, anyway, and it didn’t strain his Christian orthodoxy all that much, either.
For that matter, his Christian beliefs were a large part of it. Osaro constantly endeavored to interpret the afterlife and find the many possible permutations of it in terms of accepted church doctrine.
Yet here again was his penchant for packing an auditorium. The subtitle of the convocation: “Ghosts on Our Island.” The term “ghost” was a bow in the direction of salesmanship. Osaro wanted people to know that if they came and dropped their five bucks into the collection box in the front hall, they could hear seven crackling good “ghost stories” directly from the people who lived them.
“Ready, Mary?” George Osaro asked.
“Ready,” she said.
Mary Rovere spoke of a house she and her husband inherited four decades earlier. She was a plump woman with glasses, middle-aged, and remorselessly middle brow. She was unfashionably coiffed and dowdily dressed. She had been an island summer resident for forty years, which was part of her story.
“I have to tell you,” Mary said. “When it happened, I was absolutely terrified. Why wouldn’t I be? I was looking at a man who I knew to be dead. Yet there he was. In my bedroom. Right in front of me.” She drew a breath. “And he was trying to tell me something.”
Then she backtracked. It began, she said, a flat thirty years earlier. She was sixteen years old at the time. She was sitting in the bedroom in the Nantucket house her family still owned. The house itself was a matter of contention.
“My grandfather was from Germany,” she announced. “He was an old-fashioned man named Heinrich Schumacher. He came to America with a sister named Bettina around 1910. They settled on Nantucket.”
Osaro carefully lit his pipe and drew deeply upon it. A puffy white cloud enshrouded him. Mary drew a breath and eased into her tale.
“All his life, Grandpa was distrustful of everyone, particularly in the new world. He had a bitter falling out with Bettina. Eventually, she married and moved to Milwaukee. Their parents died in Germany, then the brother and sister each claimed the other had cheated them. How or why, I don’t know. I don’t know who was right. What I do know is that Grandpa, after he retired from the business of importing textiles, didn’t want to be alone. My mother was his only child and was divorced. So Grandpa invited us to move into the house here on the island. Mother assumed he owned it outright. There was never a problem until after he died.”
Death always has a way of complicating things. So it was in Grandfather Schumacher’s case as well. First off, no one could locate the old man’s will. And then there was the main event. Bettina’s side of the family hadn’t communicated with Schumacher for decades, Mary said. When he died, the family was notified, but no one came to the funeral. Only after Grandpa was laid to rest, did they decide that they loved him. Or at least, the family’s lawyers loved what they thought he might have left behind.
“When Grandpa passed away, his sister claimed she and her brother bought our house jointly in 1911. A trip to Town Hall actually bore out that part of her claim. Bettina only allowed her brother to live in the house, argued their lawyers, out of the goodness of her heart. But now that Heinrich Schumacher was dead, some other arrangement would have to be made. The lawyers suggested that Mary’s mother pay Bettina’s family half of the fair market value of the house to settle the claim. That, or sell it, move out and split the proceeds.
“We didn’t have the money for that. Mother was a bank teller. We barely had money for a lawyer.”
Mrs. Rovere sipped from a glass of water. “Grandpa always said that he bought out her share. But he never produced a document,” she continued. “The dispute grew nasty. So Bettina’s family hired a local lawyer, filed suit against us and, over the course of several months, tried to evict us. Mother used to sit at the kitchen table and cry. It looked as though we were on our way out of our own home. ‘Your grandpa would be rolling in his grave if he knew what was going on,’ she used to say.”
Mary drew a breath. As it turned out, she said, Grandpa was doing more than rolling.
“I was in bed reading one night when I was sixteen years old,” she said. “This was in 1956. Uh oh,” she said, laughing slightly. “I just gave away my age.”
Some laughter went around the audience.
“It was late,” she continued, “and my mother was asleep in the next room. I put down the book, and I turned off the light. But this strange feeling came over me. I couldn’t sleep. My eyes caught the glimmer of something in the room with me. Let me tell you. I nearly jumped out of my skin. In the darkness, I saw this bright figure materialize through a wall about six feet from me. Then it stopped before my bed. It was in the shape of a man. Then I realized: I was looking at Grandpa. I recognized this flat hat and big long topcoat that he always wore. He stood there in the dark room looking at me. Somehow, I could see his eyes! Oh, I could feel him there! You know how you just know there’s someone in a room with you?”
There were a few nods around the church meeting hall.
“No doubt about it. I sat up real fast in bed and turned on the light. But nothing was there. He was gone.”
Mary paused. She smiled ruefully.
“Now, I’m the first to tell you: Right away I tried to convince myself that I dreamed it. I told myself I had. But I finally fell asleep with the lamp on that night. I didn’t want any more visitors.”
Mrs. Rovere reached again for the glass of water sitting on the panelists’ table in front of her. She sipped, then continued. “It happened again a week later. Same vision. Late at night. Coming through the same stretch of woodwork. I reached over, turned on the light, and everything was gone again. Yet the second time, it didn’t unnerve me as much. Somehow I didn’t sense any danger. Yet I also knew. Something important was unsettled. So it would happen again.”
Reverend Osaro broke the mood a little by speaking. “Did you mention to your mother that this had happened?” he asked.
“No,” Mary Rovere said. “I was afraid. Well, you know how it is. Mother was upset enough. Anyway, I didn’t know if she would believe me.”
“So it did appear again? This spirit?” Osaro asked.
“This was the third and final time,” Mary said. “It was about a week later. And it coincided with the time when the fight between the two families was about to go to court. Lawyers and lawsuits...” She shook her head. “Unpleasant stuff. I hated all of it.”
“Everyone does,” Osaro concurred.
“I don’t really know how Grandpa communicated with me when he appeared the third time,” Mary said. “I don’t remember his lips moving. But I do remember him telling me something.” She drew a deep breath. “This time, I half expected him. So I rose. Sure enough, I opened my eyes and I saw him. He was dark, but sort of shining. He came right through the wall, just as he had the two previous times. He approached my bed. I remember I was sweating now because this was the first time he’d drawn so close. But then suddenly, everything seemed all right. It was my grandfather, after all. When I remembered how much we had loved each other, I was completely over my fear. And he had something to tell me.”
Somewhere in the still meeting hall, someone coughed.
“Again, I reached for the light,” Mary said, continuing. “He moved toward me quickly. He was so close that his face came within a few feet of mine. I will never forget that view. It’s still with me today.”
Mary shook her head. “My grandfather’s face. It seemed solid, yet I could see what was on the other side of it. I worked up the nerve to reach for the lamp. Not because I wanted to chase him away, but because I wanted to see him better. Then I felt his hand on mine. Oh, that hand! That touch! I would have recognized my grandfather’s hand anywhere. But it was cold. Like snow is cold. And yet, he communicated to me that everything was all right. He was there to help Mom and me. So I moved my hand back to the bed and he released me.
“He stepped back. With a theatrical motion, he opened this big long black coat that he must have worn for thirty years. It was black serge and I think it had come on his back from Germany. In any case,” she laughed wanly, “he always wore it in his lifetime so why shouldn’t he wear it in death?” To Mary’s left, Reverend Osaro smiled.
“He kept his eyes fixed on me. Then he pointed with his left hand, low. He was definitely indicating something. He pointed to the lower inside lining of the coat. His long index finger ran softly across the worn material. Then he straightened and, just as fast, vanished. I turned on the light and the room was still again.
“The next day, I told my mother the story. She insisted I had been dreaming, of course. Told me my imagination must have been running wild. Things like that didn’t happen.” Mary raised her eyebrows as if to suggest that she knew better.
“‘Well then, whatever happened to Grandpa’s coat?’ I asked her. And she told me. It was in the trunk of the car. It was boxed with several other things that were about to be thrown away. My mother felt that the old coat was so worn that no one would want it. She was probably right.” Mary grinned. “But I had a different reaction. ‘Let’s go look at it,’ I said.”
They went out to the car, Mary said, and eventually located the tattered coat at the bottom of the least accessible box. But they pulled it out, fighting with the weight of other clothes upon the coat.
“My mother is here tonight,” Mary said. “She’ll tell you what happened if you don’t believe me.”
Mary pointed to an elderly woman in the third row. The woman smiled and nodded. Mary kept talking.
“The coat pockets were empty. I laid the coat out on the ground, then ran my hand across the lining to the part that Grandpa had indicated. Immediately, I felt something. I almost jumped when I found it. We took a pair of scissors and undid the stitching on the coat. There were all of Grandpa’s important papers within the lining, right where he’d hidden them years ago. He’d worn the coat all the time because he was always carrying his papers with him.” She paused. “Everything was right where he had indicated back when his vision appeared before me. ”
Mary shrugged. At the rear of the church meeting hall, Timothy Brooks slipped quietly into the room. Brooks was a handsome, athletically-built man in his late thirties, just above six feet tall, with dark blond hair, blue eyes, and a square jaw. Unobtrusively, he sat down at a seat near the rear. Osaro, his friend, gave Brooks a slight nod, imperceptibly to almost everyone else.
“Call it what you want,” Mary concluded. “A dream. Clairvoyance. A spirit. What was found was his will. And with it there was a notarized document, all filled out and legally executed, that Bettina signed in 1949. It was a bill of sale. Grandpa had bought his share of the house from her. Bettina’s case was thrown out of court a week later.” Mary sighed.
“That’s the way we inherited our home on this island,” she said. “And that’s my first and only experience with the supernatural. The house is up on Cliff Road, and I won’t tell you the exact location.” She smiled. “As for Grandpa’s coat, it’s our family superstition. We’ve never discarded it. We keep it in the front hall hanging right there on an old wooden coat rack. ‘In case Grandpa ever drops by again,’ my Mother still says. After all, there’s not one bit of doubt in our family: Grandpa’s watching over us. He came back from the dead and gave us back our home.”
There was an appreciative murmur in the hall, followed by polite applause. It was led by Reverend Osaro, who again glanced at his watch. He allowed a few questions from the audience. Then, holding his pipe in his hand, he introduced a man named Leon Kane. Kane, seated at the other end of the table, appeared to be in his seventies.
“Leon?” Osaro asked, “What have you got for us?”
Kane seemed almost embarrassed. His hair was white and thin, his face round, his voice gravelly. Reverend Osaro had talked him into taking part in the colloquium, but he still seemed ill at ease with it.
“I’ll tell you something,” he said, shaking his head, “two years ago if you told me that I’d be sitting here talking about ghosts, I’d...”
“Spirits,” the pastor corrected gently. “Let’s call them what they are. They’re living things, not dead. Same as you or I.”
“Spirits. Ghosts. Whatever, Reverend,” Leon Kane said a little cantankerously. “There’s not a dime’s worth of difference between them as far as I know.” Kane thought about it, then turned to the smaller, younger man. “Hell, I like the word ‘ghost’! What’s the matter with it? That’s what the hell my wife saw, so why can’t I call it that?”
“As you prefer,” Osaro said. The minister smiled indulgently. He did, after all, believe in freedom of thought. “Please go on,” he said, apology in his tone.
“Where was I?” Kane asked.
Osaro helped him. “‘Two years ago, if anyone had told you.’”
“Oh, right. That’s it. Of course,” Kane said. “Look, I’m a sane, sober guy. I’m a retired firefighter. Worked for the fire department in Providence for seventeen years, then I come here, was with the Nantucket Fire Department for another five. Retired nine years ago. Widowed two years ago, which is what I want to tell you about.”
A hush slowly covered the hall.
Kane waited for a moment, as if to work up a final element of courage. Then he began.
“I was watching the Bruins play hockey one evening,” he said. “My wife was in the kitchen cleaning up after dinner. It was about seven-thirty in the evening. I remember it real well. The Bruins were playing the Rangers at Madison Square Garden. November 1, 1990. Cold night in the early fall. The game had just started. Anyway, I’m watching the television, and I hear a man’s voice in the kitchen with my wife.”
Someone laughed quietly at the notion of a strange man in the kitchen with the retired fireman’s wife.
“I heard the man say, ‘Laura, I’ve come for you.’ Nothing more. Just that. But clear. I heard them words. I looked toward the kitchen and I didn’t see nothing. Nothing at all. It was one of them things that after it happened, I couldn’t tell whether it really happened.” He glanced around to no one in particular. “Know what I mean?”
There were nods around the room. Most of the audience listened attentively, including Tim Brooks, still stationed toward the back.
“So finally I yelled out to the old girl, ‘Laura?’ That was my wife’s name. Laura,” Mr. Kane said. “ ‘Laura? You okay out there, honey?’ No answer. So now I’m wondering: What the heck’s going on? Well,” he chuckled, “I started to get up. You know, pull my fat old self up out of the chair. Just then, Laura appeared at the kitchen door. Well, we’d been married for thirty-six years. I’d never seen her so shaken. ‘Honey?’ I asked her. ‘What is it?’ She looked real frightened.”
Kane paused, then went on. “ ‘I just saw my brother in the kitchen,’ my wife said. She was talking about her brother Willie. Her only brother. Well, Willie died in a car accident in Natick. Willie had been dead for six years.”
Kane’s wife came over and sat down on the ottoman near his chair. He put his hand on hers. She said she was terribly scared because she knew she hadn’t imagined what she had seen. She had seen a ghost, she said. That’s what she called it. A ghost. So Leon Kane continued to call it that, too, Reverend Osaro notwithstanding. In Leon Kane’s explanation, Willie had been there one minute as solid as a stone barn. The next moment he had been gone.
“I would have talked her out of it,” Leon Kane said, “I’m sure I would have. But I didn’t ‘cause I heard the voice, too. Clear as a bell. ‘I’ve come for you, Laura.’ Plain as day. Just like that. And know what? It was Willie’s voice. I recognized it, too.”
Two little waves went around the audience in the meeting hall. One of fascination. The other of discomfort. Kane gave the moment a long pause, and Tim Brooks felt a hair or two rise on the back of his neck.
“I guess he had come for her,” Kane said. “Came from wherever you come from after you’re dead.” He pursed his lips. “Next day, my Laura had a stroke. By evening she was gone.”
He ran his hand through his hair. It was clear the story still caused him anguish. For a moment, thinking of his wife of thirty-six summers, something caught in his throat, and he couldn’t talk.
“But that’s not the end of the story,” he added as he recovered. “See, we was redecorating the house, Laura and me, when she died. The next thing we was going to do was get rid of this ugly old green carpet we had in the den. Well, three days later I come home and the carpet was in a big heap on the floor. It had all been pulled up. I didn’t know how it had got that way. I thought one of my daughters had done it. Or one of the grandchildren who were visiting. But, no. None of them confess to it. So I put the carpet back down. Sure enough, I found it pulled up again two days later. And then a third time after that.”
Mr. Kane smiled. A ripple of laughter moved around the meeting hall. “So finally, hell! I got smart,” he said. “I threw it out! I ordered a new one Laura had liked, but had never gotten around to buy. Had the carpet people rush the order. Well, sir. I brought the new one home and put it down myself. It’s been there since. Never got disturbed.”
Again, he smiled ruefully. “Nothing happened again. What it seemed like,” he concluded, “was Laura kept an eye on me for a few days to see if I could make it through her passing all right. When she saw that I could carry on without her, she left. She went to wherever good souls go.”
He shrugged.
“It’s not scary,” Leon Kane said. “It’s comforting, if you think about it real hard. See, deep down in my heart I know the person I love is out there somewhere. Waiting for me. I can’t explain it. I just know that in the same way Laura’s brother came for her, she kept her eye on me. And now she’s out there in The Good Place waiting for me. Heaven. That’s what I call it.”
His eyes were sparkling, as though moist.
“I’m seventy-four years old,” Kane said. “And you know what? I’m not scared of making that trip myself someday. Not scared at all.” He smiled. “I keep hoping someday I’ll look up, see her, and she’ll be holding out her hand to welcome me, and I’ll know that it’s my time, and she’s come to take me to Heaven with her.”
He tucked his lower lip into his teeth for a moment and held it. Then he turned toward Osaro. “That’s it, Reverend. That’s my story. That’s all.”
Applause followed. Then a few hands came aloft from those in the audience. Osaro cut off the questions.
“For reasons of time, I’d like to move to our final panelist,” he said. “Maybe if some of you have questions or comments for Mr. Kane, he might be generous enough to stay for a few minutes afterward to speak with you.”
Kane nodded to indicate he would.
“Otherwise,” Reverend Osaro said, “I’d like to go directly to our final guest, Doctor Richard Friedman.”
Osaro indicated a lean, angular man with short dark hair and glasses. The doctor looked like a doctor. He sat at the end of the table, next to Mary Rovere.
“Doctor Friedman is in private practice in Boston and has maintained a summer home here in Nantucket for the last ten years.”
“Two different homes here in Nantucket,” Dr. Friedman said, picking up the introduction. “That’s part of the story. We were pretty much driven out of the first one. I’m afraid my tale is nowhere nearly as uplifting as my predecessor’s.”
He cleared his throat and his eyebrows furrowed unpleasantly.
“The house is on Milk Street,” Dr. Friedman began. “It’s not terribly old. It was built around 1900 and was only inhabited by four owners before us. I’ve traced who they all were. I don’t know of anything violent or terrible that ever happened at that address.”
It started, the physician said, on a day shortly after they had moved in. His daughter, Rachel, had a bedroom adjoining the guest room on the second floor.
“She’s a bright little girl,” the doctor said. “Perceptive of moods and feelings, conscious of many things she can’t see.” He paused. “And she was always scared of a door on that floor leading from her room to the extra room. She was also frightened of the dark.”
In his seat in a rear pew, Tim Brooks folded his arms before him. Through a veil of haze created by George Osaro’s pipe, there was already something unsettling to the doctor’s appearance. Rachel was playing near bedtime one night three years earlier her father said, when she looked up and saw the figure of a man. It came through the wall and stood before her. This he announced as bluntly as if he were diagnosing a common virus. The girl was terrified. But somehow the vision communicated with her.
“‘I’m keeping watch over my place,’ the vision said. Then the man disappeared before her eyes. Rachel fled down the stairs and screamed for her parents.
“We didn’t believe in such things” Dr. Friedman said. “So we spent a lot of time insisting to our daughter that she must have fallen asleep and had a bad dream. But for weeks she wouldn’t use the room. And she slept with a light on when we finally coaxed her into moving back in.”
Friedman scratched his head. “I suppose we also had another indication that something...”he looked for the right word, “extraordinary was happening. We bought Rachel a cat to keep her company. We told her the cat would protect her and would know if something was wrong. Well, our plan was to reassure her. But the idea backfired. It was sly little gray cat named Wendy. The hair on the cat’s back would stand up if you took it to the room. If you put Wendy down, she would drop her tail between her legs and slink away. And if you tried to carry the cat through that doorway, she would scratch and claw and fight you until you dropped her. The animal wanted no part of that area of the house.”
“The apparition didn’t appear again to Rachel. And though she was constantly mindful of the possibility of a reappearance, she did calm down with the passage of time. Gradually, the spookiness became less of a factor of daily life in the house. Then an incident happened two summers later.”
“We did some extensive renovations on the upstairs of the house,” Dr. Friedman said. “The remodeling called for us to move the master bedroom to the extra room where the ghost had come from. Rachel was moved to the other end of the floor. My son, Jed, was in a room adjoining Rachel’s.”
He paused for a moment.
“I was there one night,” Dr. Friedman continued, “when a feeling of terror came upon me. It surrounded me and held me with fear. It was like a giant hand wrapping itself around me. Honestly, I couldn’t talk or move. I wanted to yell and couldn’t.” He shook his head. “Know what it felt like? It felt like something, some extraordinary presence, was trying to crush me. That’s what.”
Dr. Friedman knew he couldn’t battle this power physically. So he remembered fighting this force intellectually. As a doctor, he tried to figure out what was wrong with him—seizure, heart attack, spastic fit—and do what was necessary to save his life. But equally, he knew that he was locked in combat with something not to be found in any medical journal.
“Eventually, I managed to stamp my foot. Then I got part of my voice back. I managed to let out a muffled grunt. Then a thought came over me. I don’t remember thinking the words. I just blurted them out, surprised to hear my own voice. ‘I know,’ I said aloud.” “You’re just watch over your place.”
The statement, the doctor said, placated whatever force had gripped him. It gradually released him. There was a point, he remembered, when the feeling was tactile—something was holding him one second, letting him go the next. Then he staggered downstairs, terrified. He told his wife what had happened.
“We made the decision right then,” Dr. Friedman said. “We would get out of the house and sell it. There was no question in our minds that there was some utterly evil presence in that home. We couldn’t fight it. Nor did we dare. So the next day we started making preparations to leave.”
The preparations continued smoothly for several days. It was the end of August 2007, a quirky, moody time on Nantucket in any case as it directly followed a violent hurricane. The Friedmans assembled the clothing and belongings they wanted out of the house. They called their real estate broker and cryptically announced that they would list the home for sale but buy another one on the island. The broker didn’t understand the logic because the doctor and his wife didn’t immediately explain what happened. But the broker was grateful for the business and accepted it.
“Then my wife and I were in the living room on our final day of packing. We were within minutes of removing our final pieces of luggage. Naturally something happened that both of us will never forget. Something more totally terrifying than I ever thought I would experience in my life.”
The meeting hall of the church was still now. From the back, Tim Brooks surveyed the audience as he held on Dr. Friedman’s words along with everyone else.
Dr. and Mrs. Friedman were in the downstairs living area, the doctor recalled. Their children had been sent to stay with grandparents. So they knew themselves to be alone in the house. Then, in mid-afternoon, they froze. They distinctly heard footsteps above them-right in the area upstairs where there had been two incidents.
“‘Richard, let’s get out of here. Right now!’ my wife Bonnie said to me. And maybe we should have. But I remember thinking and saying, ‘No. If we leave it might follow us. Whatever it wants, whatever it is, let’s settle everything right here.’”
On the stage near Reverend Osaro, Dr. Friedman sipped from a glass of water. Bonnie Friedman huddled beside him, Friedman said, and they stood riveted in place as the footsteps above them grew louder. The footfalls neared the central staircase at the front of the house, then slowly descended.
They held their ground as, one by one, the footsteps came down the staircase, which they could not see from where they stood. The sound stopped a few steps from the bottom, held silent for a few seconds, then came the rest of the way, three quick steps in succession. They arrived at the base of the steps with a thud.
Mrs. Friedman gripped her husband. They were looking right at the spot where something should have been standing. But nothing that they could see was there.
“Whatever it was,” the doctor said, “it was toying with us. It was invisible.”
But it kept walking toward them. The footsteps continued across a bare floor. The sound was like heavy old-fashioned shoes dragging slowly. The pace was deliberate and came straight toward them.
“Bonnie was beside herself. She was yelling at me, begging to leave. But still I had this fear. I was afraid this thing would follow us wherever we lived, wherever we went, if we didn’t settle our business right there.”
The footfalls stopped. Still, the Friedmans couldn’t see anything.
But they felt.
“It was palpable,” Dr. Friedman said. “Like a change of air pressure in a room. It made us feel low and sickened. Then, somehow a thought was communicated to us. We shuddered and we both felt it at the same instant. We were to turn around. No one said anything. We just both knew at the same time, we were to turn.”
There before them, the doctor said, was exactly the vision their daughter Rachel had described. This was in broad daylight and the figure looked real. He looked like an old fisherman, the physician remembered, with a straggly beard, a misshapen bloodied head as if he had died in some horrible accident, clunky boots and a battered mackintosh.
“His eyes were horrible,” Dr. Friedman recalled. “Sickly white. Something wrong with the pupils as well as the sockets. Dead eyes, that’s what they were. They reminded me of a cadaver’s.”
Dr. Friedman exhaled. “My wife turned away from him, and I could feel her tremble as I held her. No words were spoken. But both Bonnie and I now knew. We were free to go, as long as we left immediately. He had won. This...This ghost, this angry, unsettled spirit, had driven us out. And he was there now to make sure we left.”
Dr. and Mrs. Friedman picked up their remaining belongings and turned toward the front door. Richard Friedman was the last to leave.
“I never looked back,” he said. “Didn’t dare. And I never went back in that house again. It’s sitting empty now. The real estate people come by now and then, but we’ve had no offers. People get a bad feeling just being in there.” Dr. Friedman heaved a dismal sigh. “Exactly what will happen eventually, how the next tenants will be treated, I don’t know. But there is not enough money in the world to send me into that place again. I don’t need it!”
He drew out a long breath. With a handkerchief, he dried the palms of his hands. He looked at his audience, which remained still.
“Wow,” he said, trying to elevate the mood. “That’s something, eh? Sorry I can’t be more uplifting. Sorry I can’t relate to you the spirit of a loved one in a contented afterlife, or how a vision from after death came back to save a family homestead. All I know is our family was run out of our summer home by an evil, malevolent spirit that didn’t want us there. I have no doubt that our lives would have been wrecked, or maybe end, if we had stayed. That’s the bottom line. And that’s my story in its entirety.”
There was some applause.
Reverend Osaro took a half-dozen questions from the audience. Then he glanced at his watch. It was nine thirty-five P.M.
“We have a minute or so left,” Osaro said, “and I’d like to claim it, if I may.”
No one objected.
“There are those,” he said in closing, “who find this whole subject difficult to fathom. And there are those others who want to believe, but can’t. I’d like to address that in a word or two.”
He weighed what he was about to put forth.
“Nantucket is an aged place,” Osaro said. “People have old houses. Generations upon generations have lived on top of each other here. Spirits like to cling to what they have known in their worldly life. So why should it really surprise us when a spirit becomes displaced, when one decides to stay in such close proximity to us that we occasionally catch a glimpse of it?”
There were smiles around the room, Tim Brooks noted. Smiles and nods. Brooks listened to his friend.
“A lot of places have them, of course,” Osaro said. “There are probably spirits in every old house, if the truth were known. Some of us in this room here tonight can see them, sense them. You know, those displaced things that lurk. That flit by. Those movements or shadows that you see out of the corner of your eye. Then if you quickly look toward them, they’re gone and you convince yourself that you didn’t see them.”
There were a few soft laughs. Brooks folded his arms. “But we know they exist,” Osaro said. “Deep in our human hearts we know. Some of us insist that they don’t. But we know. Don’t we?”
From the corner of his eye, Brooks was aware of a consensus around the room. The ascent of the converted. Yet, he noted further, there was no indication of this being a crackpot crowd. These were sane, rational people. Businessmen and homemakers. Summer vacationers. Students. Working people.
“And so,” Osaro concluded, “with so many spirits about, is it any wonder that eventually a few of us on our side of death interact occasionally with someone from the other side? Should we really be so incredulous if that happens now and then?”
Osaro paused and looked around. He sensed an unspoken answer from the assemblage.
“I think not,” the minister concluded. “And I trust many of you agree with me.” He smiled. “That’s our time for tonight,” he announced cheerily, his fingers playing with the lip of his pipe. “Thank you all for coming and a special thank you to our panelists for participating.”
There was more applause, given with enthusiasm. Then the symposium concluded. Afterward, Tim Brooks remained seated. A number of those who had attended pressed forward to ask individual questions of the participants. Brooks moved forward at this time, too, but waited patiently.
Finally the group thinned. Mrs. Rovere and Dr. Friedman were the only panelists left, aside from the pastor. “You waiting to see me, Timmy?” George Osaro finally asked.
Brooks nodded.
“I’ve never known you to come to one of my spiritual evenings,” Osaro said.
“First one I’ve been to,” Brooks confirmed.
“What did you think?”
Brooks answered as only a friend could.
“I’ve never heard such crap in my life,” Tim Brooks said softly. “I’m amazed anyone could believe a word of it.”
“Ah, Timmy...Always the ‘Doubting Thomas,’ right? I should call you the Doubting Timothy. Believe me, your day will arrive, too.”
Brooks scoffed again. He was about to give his pal the minister some more heat on the subject when he realized that time wouldn’t permit it.
The maintenance staff, all volunteers, were taking over the meeting hall. They were straightening chairs and sweeping the floor.
More importantly, one by one, the lights in the church were going off.
Chapter Two
Ever since she had been a little girl, Mary Elizabeth DiMarco loved to sleep under the stars.
At four-fifteen on Friday afternoon, July tenth, Mary Elizabeth looked at the office clock and felt a flutter of excitement. She had almost finished her day of work at the Kramer Insurance Agency in Barnstable, Massachusetts. Mary Elizabeth, Beth to her friends, held a 30 hour/week summer job at Kramer’s. But with the labors of the week almost concluded, she could turn her attention to what lay immediately ahead. She would rendezvous with her boyfriend, whom she knew from the university, for the weekend. On this occasion, for two glorious summer nights, they could both sleep under the stars. She was in love with him. And when she thought about the 48 hours ahead of her, the flutter of excitement swelled to a deep tremor.
Portly, 52-year-old Charlie Kramer, who owned the office, was an agreeable family man for whom it was not difficult to work. His agency ran smoothly, almost by itself. The most difficult decision left to Kramer each day was whether to wear his belt above or below his paunch. Thus he allowed his “girls,” as he called them, to leave a shade early on summer Fridays if their office work was complete. Insurance claims tended to arrive on Monday mornings. Most afternoons were usually spent invoicing. And few policyholders ever rushed in to pay a bill late on a Friday in mid-July.
So when the office clock marked 4:30 P.M.—official Kramer Insurance Time the staff called it—Beth took her cue. Work finished. Fun begins. She turned her attention to the two travel bags she had stashed in a closet near her desk. One was a blue crushable duffel, packed with leisure clothes, swim wear, tanning lotion, and toiletries. The other was a sleeping bag. Beth disappeared into the washroom and changed from a respectable “businesslike” print blouse and dark skirt and pumps to a pair of red shorts, a blue University of Michigan sweatshirt, and brand new white Nike sneakers with floppy pink socks. She said goodbye to Ramona and Millie, two older coworkers with families whom Mr. Kramer employed full-time and year-round. As Beth tidied her desk, the two women checked out her change of attire. The persona of the serious young female office worker had been transformed back into a fun-seeking college girl. Then they spotted her two traveling bags.
“Off for a weekend?” Millie probed.
“Nantucket Island.”
Millie and Ramona made the appropriately envious clucking sounds. “Ever been there before?” Ramona asked.
“No.”
“Going alone?”
“With a friend,” Beth DiMarco said. “My friend has been there before. “
Hesitation. Millie and Ramona looked at each other.
“A boyfriend?” Ramona asked.
Mary Elizabeth grinned sheepishly, rolled her eyes and didn’t answer further. “Maybe,” she answered. Then, “What do you ladies of the world think?” she added coyly.
The two secretaries laughed conspiratorially.
“I never had the nerve to go away with a guy when I was a kid,” the sixtyish Millie complained to her younger peer. “I was raised strict Roman Catholic in North Boston. My father would have shot me and my boyfriend, too.”
“I would have done it,” said the other woman, turning around at her desk. “But I never got asked.” They looked back indulgently to the pretty college student.
“What’s your guy’s name?” Millie asked amiably, taking the lead in the inquiry.
“Eddie.”
“Does he have a last name?”
“Just Eddie.”
Beth pondered the point for a moment, then reached to her purse. She flipped open a wallet and presented Millie and Ramona with a color snapshot of her with Eddie on the University of Michigan campus. Millie fumbled with a pair of glasses. Ramona needed no such assistance.
The picture showed a nice-looking sandy-haired boy a few inches taller than Beth. He held his arm around her waist. Eddie wore a red football jersey with a huge white 12 on its front. Beth was snuggled close to him, her head resting against his shoulder. They appeared to be at an outdoor party on a bright football afternoon in the early Autumn.
The photograph seemed to please Millie and Ramona. It made a strong case that this was a young couple in love. So anything naughty they did, the ladies decided, could be indulged, as long as it was being done responsibly. Modern times, after all. Millie and Ramona made low oooh-ing sounds to each other. Mary Elizabeth blushed.
“Does he treat you okay?” Millie asked, suddenly serious. She accompanied the question with a slight nod, hoping to evoke the correct response.
“Eddie treats me real well,” Beth answered honestly. When the two women continued to look at her, Beth felt compelled to add more.
“I’m 21 years old,” Beth said patiently. “I know what I’m doing.”
“I didn’t when I was 20,” Ramona said, more as a general statement than to either other woman. “I didn’t know anything about you-know-what until the night I was married.” She sighed. “Ah,” she half-teased, now shaking her head, “you college girls today...With your Blackberries and your pills...God bless you. You know everything I didn’t.”
“Your parents don’t mind?” Millie asked.
“My parents don’t know,” Beth said. “And it has to stay that way for a while. Okay?”
“Be careful, honey,” Millie said, reluctantly extending her approval. She released the photo and allowed Beth to tuck it back into her wallet. “Have a good time.”
Beth had every intention of doing both.
After work, Beth took a bus to the ferry depot. There she met Eddie, who arrived via a different bus from Providence, where he held a summer job doing landscape work. He met her with a kiss and a strong embrace, and swirled her off her feet. Beth and Eddie had known each other for five years, since high school, when his family moved to Massachusetts from Maryland. It was less than a coincidence that they applied to the same university. And they still acted as if they were newly in love.
The steamship to Nantucket took two hours and twenty minutes. But the time passed quickly. If Beth and Eddie hadn’t seen each other for a day or two, there was always much catching up to do. The boat was crowded. They sat with each other in a corner of the top deck, outdoors. Eddie sipped from a bottle of Heineken. Beth drank a diet cola. Eddie disappeared to smoke a cigarette on the sly. When he returned, she chided him for what she called his “filthy unhealthful habit.” If he had one vice, this was it: sneaking off to have a cancer stick. He half kidded her that he hadn’t been smoking at all. Rather, he had been scouting locations on the boat, looking for a little nook where they might make love quickly without being caught.
“Your breath smells like an ashtray,” she answered, “and what kind of cheap date do you think I am, anyway?”
“A terrific cheap date,” he kidded. “If I were a wealthy, ugly old Arab I’d buy you for my palace. You’d be my sex slave.”
“Who needs a palace?” Beth answered.
The boat arrived at Steamboat Wharf on Nantucket Island at half-past eight. Hungry, they wandered to a busy tavern at the foot of the wharf. Both had been paid that day. They had cashed their checks. To each of them, a few hundred dollars felt like a fortune. Anything was possible. Beth ordered a shrimp salad. Eddie ordered a two-pound lobster. They split a bottle of California Chablis, held hands across the table, and wandered out of the restaurant arm-in-arm shortly after ten.
There was a noisy bar on South Water Street where live music was performed. There was a ten-minute wait at the door, but they stood in line, still carrying their travel bags, and listened to a blues-based rock band for an hour. When they came out, the street was still busy. It was a Friday night, and the excitement of a summer weekend was in the air. But it was decision time. Would they obtain lodging at an inn or a guest house? Or would they do something more exciting?
When Eddie brought up the question, Beth looked upward at the brilliantly clear sky. Then she cupped a free hand to his ear and whispered. “Outside,” she said. “At least for tonight.” Such an arrangement was, after all, her passion.
“Okay,” Eddie said. “I know where.”
He did. He knew not because he had done this with other girls. He hadn’t. He knew because friends who worked on the island had told him where.
They walked up Main Street through the center of town. As the street lamps became more intermittent, they passed a trio of old whaling mansions, then a civil war monument. Then they were on a quiet stretch of upper Main on a narrow, shadowy deserted sidewalk. Eddie held her hand.
“You sure you know where you’re going?” she asked.
“Trust me,” he said.
She did. He used an old cemetery as a guidepost, and turned right at the corner of the graveyard. Less than five minutes later, he guided her off onto a side street. They tiptoed across someone’s lawn, giggled as they climbed across a rear fence, and then were at the edge of an open field. Making their way carefully in the moonlight, they found a protected corner of the field, shielded by a pair of wide old trees, yet beneath a wide starry sky.
Eddie made the announcement. “This is the place,” he said.
He was right. It was perfect.
They dropped their bags. They stood for a moment and kissed. Then Eddie laid a plastic sheet across a flat grassy section of ground. They unwound their sleeping bags and spread them one next to each other. They lay in each other’s arms kissing for a few minutes.
As a child, when she spent summer nights on the second-floor deck of her parents’ summer home in Wellfleet, Beth preferred stars to a ceiling. It had been so safe and snug back then, out under the sky with blankets and pillows and her two older sisters, her parents sleeping protectively a few rooms away. But on a night like this, as a big girl with her boyfriend, cozied into a sleeping bag on a historic island twenty-five miles off the coast of the American mainland, well, this would be magnificent. Then Eddie drew away from her for a moment. In the dimness, Beth could see him put a finger to his lips.
“I thought I heard something,” he whispered.
They lay still and listened. Beth reached to her sweatshirt and pulled it to her in case a flashlight suddenly pierced the darkness. But nothing followed. If Eddie heard something, they decided, it had been a night bird. Or a cat. Or a raccoon. Or something that need not concern them.
A full minute passed. Whatever had been nearby—if it had been anything at all—had vanished. Beth and Eddie giggled again. Then they playfully undressed each other. They used their hands and their lips to tease each other’s body for a few minutes. Then, unleashing the physical passion that had been building since they had last seen each other two weeks earlier, they made love twice on his sleeping bag. Afterward, arms and legs still intertwined, they lay together and spoke softly for many minutes until first she drifted into a pleasant sleep. Then he followed.
There was nothing, after all, comparable to sleeping under the stars with someone she loved.
Chapter Three
The bedroom was dim, long and low, and had once been a maid’s quarters. Sometime in the early part of the twentieth century, someone restored the 1730’s New England house and put a great deal of love and care into it. The problem was that many years later, witnesses would later attest, the aging edifice assumed an attitude of its own. The house, partially through events that surrounded it, would become an ominous, “otherworldly” place. Seen in retrospect, the unnatural horror of what eventually transpired was readily predictable. But that’s not anything Annette Carlson knew when she bought her home. All she knew, when the troubles began, was that she had been in the midst of a deeply satisfying sleep, and she was enjoying a pleasant dream.
In it, she saw herself on a stage somewhere in a distant, timeless place. Music was playing. Annette remembered the music clearly because it was a type she always liked, a catchy syncopated rag-time melody from an upright piano. The vision wasn’t so strange, because Annette Carlson was already a successful film actress, a name readily recognized both within the trade and, more importantly, by the public.
She performed on the legitimate stage in New York and Chicago. When she was a little younger, back in her twenties, before she was fully established in her profession, before fame and an Academy Award had been thrust upon her, she had performed summer stock in the Northeast, and acted at some playhouses in California as well.
But something started to tug Annette gently away from her dream. Something happening in the present time and place pulled her out of her reverie, and socked her back into the present—a warm, midsummer night in the 1990’s.
Something.
The something was the touch of a woman’s fingers gently stroking her forehead and temple—the feeling of a motherly hand running across her hair.
A voice inside her told her to cling to her dream. It was safer there. In her subconscious, in the mind’s eye within her dream, Annette gazed upon herself from a medium distance. She was on stage in a great music hall in the 1920’s. She was playing New York. There was a man on stage performing with her, but he was to her left, and a step behind her. Annette couldn’t discern his face, but she had a comfortable sense about him, as if she were in love with him.
Then the music began to fade. The fingers upon her face became more insistent. The music was all but gone. So was the vision of the music hall. She traveled through a tunnel of darkness. It was a sensation much like plunging in a free fall, and into the present.
Fingers.
Yes, definitely. Fingers and a soft hand were caressing her head. Annette opened her eyes.
For a moment, she thought her dream had switched gears and that she had been catapulted into a nightmare. They disbelieved, but they definitely focused.
A woman in a white dress sat at the edge of Annette’s bed. She was older than Annette, with a kindly, consoling look on her face. There was a beatific cast to her eyes, almost one of concern. Annette would remember this well. But the woman was transparent. Annette had the sense of looking through a veil of light, for she could see what was behind the woman.
“Poor dear,” the woman said. That’s when Annette bolted upright, too stunned and frightened to scream.
“I came to warn you,” the vision said next. “Everyone on the island is in danger.” It spoke, or in some other way it conveyed that thought. Coming out of her hazy sleepiness, Annette took that message from somewhere, though the spirit’s lips never seemed to move.
Then Annette was awake. Wide-eyed awake. She lunged at the apparition, swiping at it, as if to drive it away. Her hand passed through it.
The woman in white stood. She receded more than she walked, a hurt and pouting look crossed her face. There was an unnatural flow to her movement, a gliding more than a stepping, an evenness of motion that did not look real.
The specter drifted backward toward the front of the room. It disappeared either out of the door or into a closet. Or maybe it just dissipated. Annette, looking right at it and couldn’t tell which. Somehow it was gone, fading into the air.