The Invited(47)

“Look at what?”

    “She was here!” Helen said. “She was right here, standing in the corner.”

“Who?”

“Hattie.”

“Oh man.” He smiled. “Is our little ghost girl playing tricks on us again?”

“No! This wasn’t Olive. This was the real Hattie. She had black hair. An old dress. A noose around her neck.”

“Sweetie,” Nate said, taking her hand. “You imagined it.”

“She was here! I know what I saw. Don’t you smell that?”

“Smell it?”

“That rotting, boggy smell? She was here, Nate!”

The smell was fading, she thought, but still distinct.

He paused, studied her, his face full of concern—the way he looked when she ran a high fever. “It’s the crazy stories you’ve been listening to. The books you’ve been reading. And all the wine we had. You were probably dreaming about her. You woke up and part of your brain was still stuck inside the dream.”

“Nate—”

“Come on, Helen. You really expect me to believe that there was just a ghost in our house?”

She didn’t answer. How could she answer? She’d just seen the proof with her own eyes. And if Nate didn’t believe her, she knew there was no way to convince him.

She tried to imagine what would happen if it were the other way around: if he were the one saying he’d seen a ghost. Would she believe him?

Yes, she told herself. Yes, of course she would.

“Let’s go back to bed, huh?” Nate said, talking to her like she was a child who’d had a bad dream. “But I’ve gotta pee first.”

“Me, too,” Helen said.

They went back to the trailer to use the bathroom and Nate headed for the bedroom after.

“No,” Helen said. “Let’s go back up to the house.”

“Are you sure?” Nate asked, brow furrowed. “Wouldn’t you rather sleep in a real bed?”

“I think it’s cozy up there. Besides, we left a candle burning. We have to go up anyway.”

“Okay,” Nate agreed, and as they walked back up, hand in hand, Helen kept her eyes on the house, but of course it was a solid box—no holes where the windows would be—so she couldn’t see what was happening inside, if maybe Hattie had come back.

    Nate settled into the sleeping bags, and Helen went into the kitchen one more time to check the corner. It was still empty. No sign at all that anyone or anything had been there.

But it hadn’t been empty.

She knew what she’d seen.

She reached up, touched the header beam in the doorway. She imagined it had a pulse like a living thing. A living thing with a memory of its own. And maybe, just maybe, the power to call someone back.

A historical artifact turned talisman.

What if objects didn’t just hold memories but held traces of the people who’d touched them, threads that connected them still?

It was a crazy thought, one she knew better than to share with Nate.

“Come to bed,” Nate called, holding open her edge of the sleeping bag.

She went over and crawled in beside him, trying to get comfortable on the hard floor. He wrapped his arm around her, nuzzled the back of her neck.

“You know what I love about you?” he asked. “I love the places your imagination takes you. That’s what makes you such an amazing history student and teacher. Because you can read about a time and place and put yourself right back there.”

She listened to him as she lay in the dark, her eyes on the opening to the kitchen, on the beam at the top of the frame.

“It was not my imagination. And it wasn’t the wine, either.”

She knew it was pointless to argue but couldn’t help herself.

“There’s no such thing as ghosts,” Nate told her as he stroked her hair, and part of her longed to believe him. To believe she’d imagined it. Because that would make sense. That would be simple.

But the world was not simple.

She knew this.

Soon, Nate was asleep again.

“I know what I saw,” she whispered once more, to herself, to the night, to whoever (or whatever) might be listening.





JULY 13, 2015

Helen woke up on the floor of the house, body stiff and sore. She was sure she could hear the faint sound of creaking, swaying: the sound a body hanging from a noose would make.

She stared up at the beam, squinted her eyes, searching for a shadow, a sign that Hattie was there. But she wasn’t.

And neither was Nate.

His side of the sleeping bag was empty. His clothes were gone from the floor. Helen looked at her watch. Six in the morning. Too early for Nate to be up and out of bed normally. Maybe he’d gone back to the trailer to sleep. She unzipped the sleeping bag and climbed out.

“Nate?” she called.

Nothing.

The windowless house was dark. It was like being sealed in a wooden box. A coffin. Buried like Hattie.

But Hattie hadn’t been buried in a coffin, had she?

Helen thought back to what Riley had told her: folks say she was dragged into the center of the bog and weighted down. That she lies there still and that’s what makes it a haunted place.