Old things have a certain life to them. Perhaps the spirits of the dead remain to guard those places they held dear in life; perhaps there is a spirit living inside everything, and even in the absence of human care, a place's own soul takes care of it. The faithful have their own beliefs about what happens when we leave the world behind, and the faithless have their beliefs as well, but surely no one can be certain of what happens to a human soul when the body decays. We each make our own mark on the world, a mark that outlasts us — but what sort of thing is that mark? The stories we hear, though perhaps we doubt them, must give us pause and make us wonder whether perhaps our pagan ancestors were right, and no one leaves the Earth completely. This is one such story, and I urge my readers to consider its implications — for every word that follows is true.
Our tale takes place in a small town of the sort growing steadily rarer in America as the years pass. In this town, there was a house rumored to be haunted among the town's provincial inhabitants. The house was certainly older than any of the town's citizens; and only the oldest could remember when it had been inhabited. It stood at the end of a small cul-de-sac, set back further from the road than most of its neighbors. It was nearly hidden from view by the large trees that surrounded it — trees growing steadily larger from lack of upkeep, with newer trees joining them. Around the trees grew a seemingly impenetrable thicket of thorny bushes, and perhaps they were the house's salvation, as their presence thwarted the destructive intentions of little boys who would otherwise have thrown rocks through windows, carved their initials in wooden shutters, and doubtless eventually burnt it to the ground with matches or firecrackers.
For years, the town's leading men had declared the house an eyesore, though it was so well hidden from view that their claims seem baseless. At any rate, their talk remained just that, as no one could seem to find any clear indication of who the house's owners might be, and thus the town council could not be certain whether some distant relative of the house's last inhabitant was entitled to claim the property. Perhaps their efforts to demolish it were half-hearted anyway, as the citizens of the town had a familiar fondness for the ancient house, and in any event no one had any particular notion of what it should be replaced with. Or perhaps the house itself had stood rooted so long as to resist any attempts upon it; the floral fortifications surrounding it might have been an expression of the house's own will.
I shall introduce you to one of the town's inhabitants. She was a young girl, fourteen years old, a typical high school student trapped in that painful place between childhood and adulthood, unsure of her own future and interested for the first time in her own mortality. Her name was Laura, and she had felt her childish fascination with the old house growing with her, blossoming into curiosity about what history was hidden inside it. She had always heard the rumors among the children of the town that a ghost lived inside it — stories circulated that strange things happened inside of it, strange noises emanated from it on moonlit nights. Like all children, Laura had half-believed these stories — professing bravery while quietly wondering to herself whether or not the house was inhabited by the spirit of the old woman who had once lived there, whether a ghost walked its halls at night.
Laura no longer considered the notion that the house was haunted. Noises coming from it at night — if indeed they hadn't been made up entirely by the imaginations of children — were undoubtedly wind whistling through chinks in the house's walls and shutters flapping during storms. To think that the house's history was distilled into a transparent creature that dragged chains through the attic for its own obscure purposes now seemed silly to Laura. Trivial. A mundane invention of people who wished to pretend that the weight of the past could be confined to a discrete presence, something that could be avoided with magic charms or secret recitations of prayers. Laura came to gaze upon the house sometimes, stopping on her way home from school to see if she could approach through the hedge surrounding it, or just watching it and wondering what had transpired inside it that left the old woman who had lived inside it so utterly alone in her final years. The past was nearly a tactile sensation when she looked at the house, and Laura knew that whatever its history was, whatever mark the old woman had left upon the house, it was certainly nothing that could be chased away by priests sprinkling holy water.
One afternoon in early October, Laura's walk home from school took her past the street the house sat on. She decided, as she did more and more often, to try to approach the house. She walked the short distance down the street and approached the dense brush surrounding it. It was tangled with the leaves that had begun to fall; the large oak and maple trees surrounding the house were turning red and yellow and the pleasant, earthy odor of fallen vegetation filled the air. As usual, though, she could find no passage through the thick, spiny branches surrounding it. Instead, she decided to sit on the sidewalk and watch the house, and imagine what might have happened there once upon a time, who the woman was who had inhabited it, decades ago.
An idea occurred to her. Next to the old house lived an old woman. Mrs. Wolfe was around ninety years old, one of the oldest people in the town, old enough to remember when the house had been inhabited. Mrs. Wolfe's house was small, with light green paint that had begun to peel as she had become more feeble and less able to care for it. Generous neighbors undertook the upkeep on her lawn, and it was a neatly-manicured match for the rest of the neighborhood, except for the hedge that had begun to creep across the property line. Laura was nervous to ask a stranger questions about what she remembered from long years back, but her curiosity swiftly made the decision for her.
Laura walked up the steps and knocked on the door, wondering whether Mrs. Wolfe would even answer. But the door opened up, and Laura introduced herself and said that she had a question about the town. The frail old woman ushered her inside. She was skeletal; her skin seemed stretched across her skull. Her hair was thin. She seemed beyond old — she looked older than she had any right to be. Unnaturally old, ravaged by time but surviving thanks to some miraculous force that gave her decrepit frame the strength to walk, bent over slightly, but unassisted. She sat Laura down in an immaculately clean living room, although the furniture was threadbare.
"I'd offer you something to eat, dear, but I doubt I have anything you'd like," said Mrs. Wolfe. "I only really cook for myself nowadays, and I don't have much of a sweet tooth. My Henry loved sweets; I used to bake cakes and pies for him, but since he passed on I don't have much call to do that. We tried to have children, you know, but we couldn't, and in those days there really wasn't anything you could do about that.
"I'm sorry. You didn't come here to ask about my marriage. What did you want to know about the town? I've lived here all my life. I wanted to leave, but somehow, I kept being drawn back. Henry and I lived in California when we first got married, but we moved back in here to take care of my father; he was all alone after my mother died, and I really never had any reason to leave after that."
"Mrs. Wolfe, I was wondering if you remembered the woman who used to live in that old house next door. Did you live here your whole life? Do you know what her name was?"
Mrs. Wolfe frowned, and then sighed. "I don't like to talk about that. I've spent seventy-four years pretending I don't know anything about her, but I'm not going to live much longer, and the world should know what happened.
"How old are you, Laura?"
"Fourteen."
Mrs. Wolfe leaned back and began her tale. "Fourteen. That's exactly my age when it happened. My deepest regret is what happened that Halloween. The old woman in that house — she was already old, even then, probably as old as I am now. And we children were cruel to her. I can't defend what we did, though I have to tell myself that if we knew what would happen we wouldn't have done it.
"As I said, it was Halloween. We were too old to beg the neighbors for sweets, so the three of us engaged in mischief instead. It was innocent, or so I thought. We threw rocks at the old woman's house — her name was Mrs. White. I never learned her first name — our parents would have whipped us for calling someone her age by her first name. Times change, I suppose. Incidentally, for the sake of posterity, my name is Catherine.
"Anyway, we were throwing rocks at her house. We were there on the front walk, but we didn't dare get too close to the house; there were rumors that the woman inside was wicked — that she had seduced men in her youth, broken their hearts, driven them to suicide. She had a husband once, they said, but he loved her so much he died for the lack of returned affection. It was probably just rumor; people's jealousy drives them to strange things, and it was said that Mrs. White was a great beauty in her youth. I still don't know the truth, but we all wondered what she might do to us if we drove her to it. Of course, our fear just made us more determined to provoke her. My friend Agnes aimed for her front window. She broke it; it shattered and we heard it echoing through the street. The others wanted to run, but I convinced them to stay. Even then, those hedges were there; you could walk up to the house in those days, but there were plenty of places in her yard to hide.
"It was a childish thing to do, but I told them to hide with me. See if Mrs. White came out of her house. If she did, we would jump out in front of her and give her a scare. It was Halloween, after all, I told them. And she did. She opened up her door, carrying a candle, but a gust of wind blew it out. She looked for us in the darkness, and started walking around her lawn to try to find us. And when she approached us, I jumped out of the bushes and yelled 'Happy Halloween!' as loudly as I could.
"And, well, she was old. Ancient. Her heart couldn't take the strain. We thought she had fainted from fear, but my friend Lily bent over her, and she wasn't breathing. We told each other we'd pretend we had never been there. We swore each other we'd never tell anyone — and as far as I know, this is the only time that oath has been broken.
"I still blame myself for what happened. We were all making trouble, but I was the one who insisted on scaring poor old Mrs. White. I think all the years of being tormented by the neighborhood children were too much, and this time it killed her. We never spoke about it again. Lily and Agnes both died only a few years later. Lily got sick and died from scarlet fever. Agnes was hit by a car. For years I thought it was a judgment, that surely we were being struck down for what we did to poor Mrs. White. I was sure that, as the most blame-worthy of us, I wouldn't survive much longer. But I did. Sometimes I think that I was being silly and superstitious. Other times I think my judgment was having to live so long and remember what we did.
"I want you to know this because it's important. It's a story people should know; it's part of our town's history. I don't want it to die with me, and I know I won't live much longer. Thank you, Laura, for listening to me ramble. I'm sure the town's history isn't as interesting to you as it is to me. But it feels good to tell someone else the story; perhaps I can forgive myself now."
Laura could not answer. She had no idea how to respond to what Mrs. Wolfe had told her. So she thanked the old woman for talking to her, and walked the rest of the way home, wondering even more what had left Mrs. White alone in that house, what stories her life had contained.
Laura often visited Mrs. Wolfe after that; she felt as though learning the old woman's past bound them. The fact that they shared a secret that no one else knew made them partners of a sort. As October continued on, Laura visited a few times a week, to rake leaves or bring small presents — an old vase, filled with wildflowers that she had picked, a dish of roast beef (Laura had guessed that Mrs. Wolfe was surviving on a small pension or limited savings, and suspected she didn't eat very well.) Mrs. Wolfe had other stories about the town's history — how the area surrounding the town used to be farmland, and when the county fair meant a risk of traffic stopping when an escaped cow stopped on the road; how back in 1937, the mayor had accidentally stepped on his very prim wife's dress during a speech dedicating a new town hall, tearing off the entire bottom half of it. Mrs. Wolfe enjoyed telling these stories; Laura found herself hurrying home to write them in her diary afterwards, worried about the fallibility of her own memory and wanting to ensure that the history Mrs. Wolfe embodied didn't die with her.
Mrs. Wolfe, in turn, seemed to be becoming more delicate. Her advancing age left her less and less capable. It is my belief that both she and Laura recognized that these were the last few weeks of her life. She seemed to be becoming paler. She appeared lighter, despite the food that Laura brought her. She started to seem almost ethereal, as though she was preparing for her last voyage. Her hair seemed to be getting longer day by day, still white, but where it had been short it now came down to her chin, and then to her shoulders. It seemed to Laura that the age spots on her hands and face were disappearing. It was as if she had already begun the transformation to a celestial spirit, clinging to earth only out of habit, soon to leave.
Laura's curiosity regarding the old house grew with each passing day. She asked her parents if they knew anything about the house's history or the woman who had lived there, but they had never heard any of its history. She looked up old records in the local library, and discovered that Mrs. White's first name was Joanne, but there was nothing else to be found. No one Laura could find knew even that much, and she became more determined than ever to eventually enter the house and see what was inside. She had begun to feel as if it was calling to her, telling her that it wanted her to come in. It wanted to divulge its past. Laura felt certain, when she stared at the house, that it was growing anxious for others to know its history. But the plants growing around it remained as impenetrable as ever, and Laura felt she could not ask others to help clear them without arousing suspicion.
Young girls hold their secrets tight, though most of them pertain to invented passions and imagined slights. Laura had been holding tight the secret of the old house; she had told no one of her fascination, of her new friendship with the eighty-eight-year-old woman next door. She felt herself strangely separate from her friends, consumed in their own thoughts of romance, their efforts to find boyfriends, their tales of who danced with whom and what couple was found kissing inside the janitor's closet. Laura started to find her friends' petty concerns irrelevant and found herself nodding politely while thinking of new avenues to enter the old house or other sources of information about it.
She convinced her two best friends that they should try to sneak into the house on Halloween. Jessica and Ashley had also heard the rumors about the house while growing up, and as children, every so often when the three had walked past the street it was on they would wonder about whether it was really haunted. The two smiled at Laura's suggestion and plainly thought the idea of sneaking in was a little bit childish — like all children of that age, they had the remarkable trait of thinking that only the things that mattered to them were truly important. Even so, there was little hope of being invited to the right parties, the ones where the idolized sixteen and seventeen-year-old boys would be with illicitly-purchased liquor and amorous intentions.
Thus the three of them agreed to try to sneak into the house. Ashley had the practical thought to bring candles and matches so they could explore the house if they managed to find a way in. Flashlights seemed inappropriate to the occasion. Laura was unaccountably certain that they would be able to enter; the house's palpable presence in her psyche had grown into an obsession, and without a doubt, if there was any night appropriate to enter it, it was Halloween. Surely they would find a way.
A few days later, it was Halloween. Laura and Ashley went to Jessica's house to hand out candy to the trick-or-treaters and make their plans. They put on warm clothes and decided to wait until it was fully dark, when the children would be off the streets again. Jessica sighed that she wished she could attend a party where she knew a certain boy she liked would be. But instead they grabbed pocketfuls of leftover candy in case they were gone long; Laura had stolen her father's crowbar to get through locked doors or stuck windows, though she was not precisely sure how to use it. They set out to walk the few blocks over to the house after assuring Jessica's parents that they wouldn't be out too late.
As they walked up to the house, every other house on the block had lights on inside; most had Halloween decorations. The three girls crept along the sidewalk, past Mrs. Wolfe's house with its light green paint. It was pitch black outside, in a neighborhood without streetlights, and the icy wind caused the trees to rattle. They wandered along the sidewalk, but the thicket surrounding the house prevented them from entering. "How are we going to get in, Laura?" whispered Jessica.
"Hold on. We'll find a spot. Wait. Look . . . the branches are further apart here. We can squeeze through this spot." She wondered whether her friends were going to turn back at the prospect of perhaps incurring scratches from the bushes. But both her companions nodded in agreement.
"I've always wondered what this house was like inside. I've heard that there used to be an old lady who lived here — I've heard she was rich. I wonder if she left any jewelry when she died," said Ashley. Jessica murmured her agreement.
They squeezed in between the branches. Somehow, they seemed to bend away from the girls; the three slowly made their way to the porch without suffering a single scratch. Laura felt more convinced that the house was trying to pull the girls in just as much as they were trying to enter it.
The girls looked around on the old-fashioned front porch. The house was bigger than Laura had imagined. It was a sprawling mansion, far larger than she could have guessed from seeing glimpses of it between tree branches. Carved white columns in imitation of classical architecture framed the porch. The two front windows were whole, and Laura wondered who had fixed the one Agnes had broken seventy-four years previously.
Jessica gasped. "Look at these columns. Look at the paint. It hasn't peeled at all. It looks like it was painted last week."
Laura ran her fingers over a column. It was pristine, as was the trim around the windows and front door. The outer walls were red brick; somehow, despite the thick growth of plants around the house, no vines had grown on the brick itself; the outside of the house seemed to have been meticulously cared for.
"Okay, either someone's still living here, and they come and go by helicopter, or else there's actually a ghost here putting new paint on everything. Can ghosts hold paintbrushes?" said Ashley, her joke marred by the nervous quiver in her voice.
Laura plunged ahead; she walked up to the door and reached for the knob, but as she stepped towards it, it opened on its own, as if an invisible butler were welcoming her. Her friends followed; their anticipation was palpable. They walked in, and Laura quickly lit her candle. The flickering light revealed a foyer that led into a sumptuous living room. Wood floors still gleamed in the glints of moonlight coming through the tall windows on three sides of the room. A sofa upholstered with velvet faced a fireplace; several large chairs suggested that Mrs. White had once entertained guests in the house. The fireplace was still stacked with wood; Laura knelt by it and saw that all it needed was to be lit. She touched her candle to the kindling, and within a few minutes the fire was roaring. There was enough light to look around, now. Kerosene lamps hung on the walls, which Laura didn't know how to light, but the fire was burning bright enough to see the living room clearly.
Laura sat on the sofa in order to take a closer look at a photograph sitting on the end table. It was sepia-colored, but the picture appeared not to have faded at all. It showed a bride and groom, both very young, the woman very pretty, with her arm around the man's waist. Her dark hair curled around her face, and her smile was dazzling. The man with her was handsome; neither could have been over twenty. He had his arm around her shoulder, and his face was tilted towards hers, as though he couldn't resist looking even for long enough to take a picture.
Laura knew that the woman was Mrs. White. She was certain that the face in the picture was the woman she had obsessed over. Laura was relieved to see that Mrs. White must have married young; it seemed unlikely that she was the heartless vixen that rumor described. She felt her obsession with Joanne White grow sharper — she had to go to the county courthouse; see when Mrs. White had married, find out Mr. White's name. Find out when he had died, and left his wife a lonely widow, without visitors, pacing through the mansion alone.
"Oh my God, Laura, look. There's no dust on anything," said Jessica. Laura ran her finger over the table; sure enough, it was perfectly clean, as though someone had anticipated their presence. The bookshelves that sat against the walls were clean as well; Laura pulled a leather-bound copy of The Three Musketeers off the shelf, and opened it, expecting the paper to be dessicated and fragile. There was no dust on the spine, and the paper didn't even appear to have yellowed, as though it had been placed there recently. Or as though the house hadn't changed at all since Joanne White's death.
Suddenly the fire went out. It happened swiftly; one moment it was was casting its warm, flickering light over the room, and the next it was dark again. A creaking sound filled the room, and in the foyer Laura saw the front door open once more of its own accord. The book tumbled out of her fingertips and fell to the floor.
"Okay, I think I'm ready to go," said Ashley. The three girls left quickly, the door slamming shut behind them. Laura led the way into the thick hedge, which once more parted around them and closed behind them, pushing them along until they reached the sidewalk.
The three girls huddled together on the sidewalk. "Let's throw rocks at that old woman's house. See if we can get her to come out," whispered Lily.
Catherine giggled. "You know, they say she's wicked. Who knows what she'll do to us if she sees us?"
"Oh, come on. It'll be a laugh," said Agnes. She picked up a pebble and threw it. It clattered against the siding, and bits of green paint chipped off.
"Just don't let her see us," whispered Catherine. She picked one up as well, heaved it at the house. It made a resounding bang against the shutters. Lily through the next one, and then another, pelting them against the door.
Then Agnes picked up a particularly big one, and gave it a mighty throw. It crashed through the front window; the sound of breaking glass seemed to reverberate through the street.
"Oh, no. We had better get out of here. Someone's going to come find us. The old woman is sure to have heard that one," whispered Lily.
Catherine grinned at her. "It's Halloween. Let's give that old hag a scare. Look, she's coming out. Hide behind this bush."
Mrs. Wolfe emerged from her house, somehow moving more quickly than ever before, but looking so frail that she might blow away in the autumn winds. "Who's there?" her voice quavered. "Come out and tell me who you are, or I'll call the police and let them take care of it."
The three girls huddled together as Mrs. Wolfe, armed with only a flashlight, began to look around for the source of the stone. Her hand shook, and the flashlight fell; the light went out, and she made no move to pick it up. She walked around her house, and finally walked over to the bush the three girls were hiding in. Catherine crouched, tensed her muscles, prepared to spring up.
"Is someone there?" called out Mrs. Wolfe. Catherine jumped up, and for a moment their eyes met. Mrs. Wolfe looked into the girl's face; she saw it — saw her own eyes looking back at her, the face she had had when she was fourteen years old. She saw the grace of her youthful face, the triumph and then the terror, she saw it before her. She understood now.
"Oh, no. She's fainted," gasped Jessica. "We have to find a doctor."
Ashley bent over the body, held her head close to the old woman's lips. "She's not breathing." She took her fingers, held them to the woman's neck. "She's . . . she's dead. We killed her."
"It's not our fault," said Jessica. "She's old. She must have had a weak heart. All we did was scare her."
Laura looked down at Mrs. Wolfe's body. "Happy Halloween," she whispered. Mrs. Wolfe looked peaceful and calm; Laura understood that Mrs. Wolfe had now been forgiven; perhaps the coroner's examination would reveal a heart attack, but Laura knew that she had been let go. The old house next door was finished with her; it had relinquished the grip with which it tied Catherine Wolfe to the earth long past her natural years.
The girls swore an oath to each other not to reveal what had happened, but only Laura really understood. The others could never guess what had led them to throw rocks at the old Mrs. Wolfe's house; they didn't like to talk about it. But Laura recognized that certain debts must inevitably be repaid.
She went back to the house frequently after that, by herself, in secret. It welcomed her now; the hedge surrounding it would part easily, and she would sneak in, out of sight of anyone who would be curious about her presence there. She realized that Joanne White had never really been alone, not while she lived in the house. Old things have a certain life to them; the house itself was a companion to Joanne White, and it cared enough to pull Catherine Wolfe close, hold her there until an understanding was achieved — not vengeance but reconciliation, but still Laura recognized that an old wrong had been put right.
Having explored the house entirely, she had found enough hints to discover that Francis White had been a soldier for the Union during the Civil War; he and Joanne had gotten married when she was only seventeen, just before Francis had left her to fight. He had never come back. Laura found Joanne's diaries on a shelf in her bedroom; the house led her to them, and she knew that she was allowed to read them. Joanne had lived with her parents, as it was not expected that a young woman — even one who had been married and widowed, would live on her own. Her parents had encouraged her to remarry, but she decided that a life of memories of Francis was better than a life spent with someone else. She inherited the house from her parents when they died, and she had once been the center of the town's social scene; the living room, with its sumptuous furniture and the piano in the corner had ignited many romances and hosted the town's most prosperous citizens. But when the town got a little larger, when the farming that sustained it began to ebb and be replaced by stores and factories, when Joanne white reached middle age, she found herself alone most of the time, an anachronism in a mansion from an earlier age.
By the accounts of her diaries, though, she was still content. They documented long ocean voyages to distant parts of the world. The house's library was thoroughly stocked — Joanne was clearly a voracious reader. Bundles of letters remained in the boxes under her bed, archives of old correspondence with faraway friends. She and the house had developed a certain companionship between them, and it was enough for Joanne.
Laura never knew whether the house was still inhabited by the ghost of Joanne White, or whether the house itself had grown protective of its memories and determined to right past wrongs. She spent more time at the old house than her own during the following years, and it was always the place she considered home. When she was twenty-six, she purchased it from the town for a small price — property values in the area were low, and no one in the town council could stand the thought of selling it to a developer to be torn down. Laura filed papers and the house officially recognized a "historic building", a part of the town's past to be preserved for the future. She performed some judicious trimming of the trees and hedges, revealing the old mansion's beauty to everyone else in the city, and people began to visit the house again. The furniture was no longer empty, the books no longer unread.
Mostly, though, she spent a lot of time alone with the house. Perhaps she would one day marry someone and have children, but the house and its memories were companionship enough for now.
We all leave a mark on the world from our living, one that remains after we die. It is foolish to imagine that memories are inert, that the past is merely nostalgia. What happened before remains as surely as what is here now, and those who pay attention can see those marks and feel the life that infuses supposedly inanimate objects. Joanne White's house was as much made from the memories she left as from brick and mortar. The lives of those long past still exist, if we take the time to look for them.
It's the Season for Graves Cracking: The 2006 Quest for Fear