The Shape of Night(56)

“If he’s not a ghost, what is he?” I ask.

“Interesting that you use the word ‘he.’?”

“Why wouldn’t I? Captain Brodie was a man.”

“How often does he appear to you, Ava? Do you see him every day?”

“It’s not predictable. Sometimes I don’t see him for days.”

“And what time do you see him?”

“At night.”

“Only at night?”

I think about the dark figure I saw standing on the widow’s walk when I came back from the beach that first morning. “There’ve been times when I may have seen him during the day.”

“And he always appears to be Captain Brodie?”

“This was his house. Who else would he appear to be?”

“It’s not who, Ava. It’s what.” She glances back at the house, which has receded to only a vague silhouette in the fog, and she hugs herself to quell her trembling. Only yards from where we stand is the cliff’s edge and far below, hidden in the mist, waves are pummeling the rocks. We are trapped between the sea and Brodie’s Watch, and the fog seems thick enough to smother us.

“There are other entities, Ava,” she says. “They may seem like ghosts, but they aren’t.”

    “What entities?”

“Dangerous ones. Things that can cause harm.”

I think of the women who lived in Brodie’s Watch before me, women who died in this house. But doesn’t every old house have such a history? Everyone dies, and we all have to die somewhere. Why not in your own home, where you’ve lived for decades?

“These entities aren’t the spirits of dead people,” says Maeve. “They may take on the appearance of people who once occupied a home, but that’s to make us feel less afraid of them. We all think that ghosts can’t hurt us, that they’re just unfortunate souls trapped between spiritual planes.”

“What have I been seeing, then?”

“Not the ghost of Captain Brodie but something that’s assumed his form. Something that’s been aware of you and watching you since the moment you stepped through the front door. It’s learned your weaknesses, your needs, your desires. It knows what you want and what you’re afraid of. It will use that knowledge to manipulate you, imprison you. Harm you.”

“You mean physically?” I can’t help but laugh at this.

“I know it’s hard to believe, but you haven’t encountered the things I have. You haven’t looked into the eyes of…” She stops. Takes a deep breath and continues. “Years ago, I was called about a house just outside Bucksport. It was a mansion, really, built in 1910 by a wealthy merchant. A year after they moved into that house, his wife tied a rope around her neck and hanged herself from the upstairs banister. After her suicide, the place was said to be haunted, but it was such a beautiful home, high on a hill with views of the water, that it was never hard to find someone willing to buy the place. Again and again it changed hands. People would fall in love with the house, move in, and quickly move out again. One family lasted only three weeks.”

“What made them leave?”

“The locals believed it was the ghost of the merchant’s wife, Abigail, scaring them off. They talked about sightings of a woman with long red hair and a rope knotted around her throat. People can learn to live with ghosts, even develop affection for them and consider them part of their living family. But this haunting was far more frightening. It wasn’t just the thumps at night or the doors slamming shut or the chairs rearranging themselves. No, this was something that made the family reach out to me in desperation.

    “They had fled the house in the middle of the night, and were living in a motel when they called me. They were a family of four with two darling little girls, four and eight years old. They were from Chicago and they came to Maine with the idea of living in the country, where he’d write novels and she’d grow a vegetable garden and keep chickens in the yard. They saw the house, fell in love with it, and made an offer. It was June when they moved in, and for the first week, it was glorious.”

“Only a week?”

“At first, no one talked about what they were all feeling. A sense of being watched. A sense that, even when they were alone, someone else was in the room. Then the older daughter told her mother about the thing that sat by her bed at night, staring at her. That’s when the rest of the family began to talk about what they’d experienced. And they realized they’d all seen and felt a presence, but it took different forms. The father saw a red-haired woman. The wife saw a faceless shadow. Only the four-year-old saw what it truly was. Young children have no illusions; they detect the truth before we do. And what she saw was a thing with red eyes and claws. Not the ghost of Abigail, but something far older. Something ancient, that had attached itself to that house. To that hilltop.”

Red eyes? Claws? I shake my head in disbelief at the turn this conversation is taking. “You sound like you’re talking about a demon.”

“That’s exactly what I’m talking about,” she says quietly.

    I stare at her for a moment, hoping to see some glint of humor in her eyes, some sign that a punch line is coming, but her gaze is absolutely steady. “I don’t believe in demons.”