Help for the Haunted(24)
Despite all the months that had passed, holding that book in my hands made me every bit as nervous as it had that night in the backseat. Some part of me worried about Rose coming home still, so I clicked on the flashlight and turned off the ceiling lamp, then sat down on the floor and flipped pages. My mother used to complain about Heekin’s convoluted way of stringing together sentences. Judging from passages that leaped out, I understood why:
If you are a believer who has come to this narrative, there is nothing that I, the author, can do to prepare you, the reader, for what you are about to discover . . .
. . . The Masons could very well open a museum of curiosities in the basement of their home, for that is where the remnants of their excursions in the realm of the paranormal live. I use the word “live” because, to this visitor at least, many of the things I encountered on my tour beneath their house did feel exactly that: alive. One of the very first artifacts I took note of upon entering the basement was a hatchet, which seemed to carry a life force all its own. This weapon was used in a tragic family slaying at what was once the Locke Farm in Whitefield, New Hampshire. But that, as they say, is only the beginning . . .
. . . Perhaps the most infamous case that the Masons have spoken about in lectures and media outlets is that of Penny, the child-sized Raggedy Ann doll hand-sewn by a mother from the Midwest with instructions from a mail-order kit. A gesture of hope, it was a gift to her only child, a girl who lay terminally ill until she died with the doll at her side . . .
“He writes like he talks,” I could still hear my mother saying as I sat in Rose’s dark bedroom, her humidifier puffing away like a sick old lady reading over my shoulder.
“You mean a lot of hogwash?” my father said in response.
“I mean too many words. Someone should take a vacuum cleaner to his sentences. No wonder the man’s a reporter for the Dundalk Eagle and not a big-city newspaper. We never should have let him into our lives.”
“You’re right about that last part,” my father told her. “But his writing style is the least of our problems.”
I skimmed the mess until I came to the photo section with the image I’d lingered on in the backseat of the Datsun. That night, it had been too dark to make out the caption, but I saw it now: THE VANDALIZED KITCHEN IN ARLENE TRESCOTT’S APARTMENT, DOWNTOWN BALTIMORE. 1982. Not a farmhouse after all, I thought, turning to the table of contents. The book was divided into three sections. The first detailed each of my parents’ childhoods and their early years together. The second consisted entirely of case studies, including only the briefest mention of Abigail Lynch. The final section was titled simply: “Should You Really Believe the Masons?”
Their childhoods—those were the chapters I turned to first, since what details I knew of their lives before me were fuzzy. I knew my father grew up in Philadelphia, and that my grandparents owned a movie theater with a candy store in the front. But I didn’t know that at age nine, he reported his first paranormal experience when he saw “a globule of energy among the seats” while sweeping that theater. When he told his mother and father, they laughed and suggested that his “globule” was probably a couple who stayed after the movie to kiss. Over dinners, my grandparents and their friend, Lloyd, who helped run the theater, coaxed my father into telling the story. When he described the lightless mass that shifted and reshaped in the shadows among the seats, the room exploded with laughter, filling my father with shame. For that reason, he quit mentioning the globules, even as they began to appear with increasing frequency.
[page]Maybe it was all the cavity-inducing sweets from the candy shop that gave him the idea to become a dentist. Maybe it was all the teasing and those persistent sightings that made him want to study away from home. Whatever his reasons, despite the fact that there were perfectly good dental schools in Philly, my father applied to the University of Maryland. Moving into an apartment in one of the old Pascault row houses for students, he reported a newfound sense of freedom, having left his family behind. But he soon discovered that not everything had been left behind.
The ghosts—as he began calling them, plain and simple—had followed.
At this point in the chapter, Heekin broke from his own tangled writing and allowed my father to describe the moment, referencing a quote from a lecture he gave to the New England Society for Paranormal Research. Reading my father’s words reminded me that when he spoke of the things he encountered, I felt no tug-of-war between believing and not believing. I simply believed.
Not far from my bed in the dim light of that apartment stood a figure no more than four feet tall. Before that night, the things I’d seen had been shapeless, shifting masses. Their lack of a fixed form is what led me to refer to them as globules from an early age. But this figure was different: its body looked like that of a dressmaker’s dummy. No arms, but also no sliver of light between its legs, so it seemed to be wearing a dress. Although there were no eyes, no nose, no mouth to gauge her emotions, I sensed that she was studying me with great curiosity and need before she vanished . . . Just as some people forever attract stray animals, others tend to draw out the humming, peripatetic energies in this world. After that experience, I realized I was in the latter category . . .
My mother reported no such paranormal experiences growing up in a tiny mountain town of Tennessee. Heekin said that her father had died in an accident on the farm, one she witnessed at the age of eleven, and the mere mention of it forever held the power to bring her to tears. He persuaded my mother into offering a description of the man: gentle, soft-spoken, scrupulous, devout. He took their small family of three to church each Sunday and to breakfast afterward. He built birdhouses in his woodshed and allowed my mother to paint them whatever colors she wanted before nailing them up in the trees. With binoculars, they watched from the second-floor windows as families of birds came and went with the seasons. Those birdhouses, those binoculars, were the loveliest pieces of her childhood, my mother told Heekin during their interview, but they also exacerbated the heartbreak she felt after her father was gone.