Driving on Prince Edward Island turned out to be surprisingly soothing. Taro had rented a car at the airport in Charlottetown for the drive to the eastern side of the island. Outside of the city, the roads were two-lane and lightly traveled, lined with evergreens and farm fields. He passed fewer and fewer vehicles as he drove through the afternoon.
The old two-story farmhouse on the northeast corner of the island was perfect, just as it had appeared in the real estate photos. It gleamed, white and inviting on the lonely road, its nearest neighbor an unassuming white church huddled beside a well-kept graveyard. A caretaker was mowing the grass between the headstones when Taro pulled up.
Perfect, peaceful, bucolic, with the sea a short walk down the road. The pastor who watched the property and provided him the key warned him that the place might be a bit rough. The house had been empty for two years. When Taro opened the side door that led into the kitchen, herds of dust bunnies and dust raccoons and dust sheep greeted him, but structurally it was sound. The windows were tight. The floors barely creaked. He shook his head at the general state of neglect and told himself he would clean up in the morning.
The kitchen was compact but still had room for a table and chairs. The refrigerator was an ancient model, the kind with a latch handle that they'd stopped making for safety reasons, but it ran just fine when Taro plugged it in. The rest of the downstairs was taken up by the dining room, with a table large enough to seat a family of ten, a den where creaky leather furniture lurked, and the front room where a battered old couch held court amidst dust-crowned bookshelves. A quick glance through titles hinted at a collection of books about local history and stories, which would be a wonderful find.
Though why the previous owner left them—strange.
Upstairs wasn't much better. The bedrooms situated along the long hallway of the second floor were just as dusty as downstairs, but at least the linens were in a tightly sealed closet. The sheets and towels had escaped the dusty fate of the rest of the house. Taro did find cleaning supplies (Hallelujah!) in the larger of the two bathrooms with a half-full container of furniture polish. He cleaned off the bed, nightstand, and bureau in the bedroom farthest from the stairs, since that one didn't have dust-laden curtains on the windows, and called it done for the night. Once he'd made the bed, he was tired enough that he was sure he wouldn't move in his sleep, much less sleepwalk.
Just in case, he still raided the kitchen for pots and pans to set across his bedroom doorway as an alarm. While he was rummaging through the cabinets, he thought about sleepwalking versus ghosts. You're supposed to make salt barriers for ghosts, aren't you? Taro stood with the container of Morton's in one hand, feeling silly while the clock ticked off ten minutes. Finally, he shook out salt lines across the back-door threshold, the kitchen, the dining room, and the bedroom as well, just outside his cookware barrier. He hated to go to bed in a filthy house. The thought made his skin crawl, but he could barely keep his eyes open.
Stumbling with exhaustion, he locked the bedroom door and crawled under the covers, expecting that all his preparations would be intact when the sun rose and he would feel ridiculous.
The next morning, he had hope. His door remained locked. Nothing in his chosen bedroom appeared to have been disturbed, down to his carefully stacked wall of pots. Hope did a nose dive into the hardwood and died when he opened the door. The salt line across his doorway had vanished. The hallway floor gleamed. His heart decided a heavy thud-thump would be the best rhythm as he crept down the hall. The bathroom tiles sparkled. All the dust animals had been herded out of the bedrooms. Downstairs echoed the upstairs, every surface cleaned and polished, his salt lines all swept away. He stood in the middle of the kitchen trying to find a calm spot inside him and failing miserably.
"Okay, I can't do this," he said to the ancient refrigerator. It answered by kicking its compressor on with a sympathetic hum. "Whatever's happening here, I just can't. Not alone. If this is me, I'm scaring the hell out of me. And if it's not me, it's scaring the hell out of me more."
The fridge clicked and thumped before it went back to humming. Taro chose to interpret that as agreement.
"I need to get back home to regroup."
New York would be safe. He knew his place there was fine. Nothing out of the ordinary had ever happened in his six months there except for the pizza guy making a pass at him. It was home now, and he desperately needed to get back to people he knew, people whose advice he trusted. Maybe it was admitting defeat, but he was too anxiety-ridden and worn down to care anymore.
The house had no internet connection and a flickering bar of cell phone service, so Taro found himself using a telephone book and a landline phone from the fifties to call the airport for flight information. There was a flight to LaGuardia with only one stop in Halifax, but not until late that evening. It would have to do.
He cleaned up and packed, puttered through the library in the front room, and decided to drive to the little grocery down the road to pick up something for lunch. A whole loaf of bread would have been a waste, since he couldn't easily put it in his luggage. He bought a yogurt and an apple, which caused raised eyebrows on the elderly couple behind the counter.
"You on a diet, son?"
"Ha, um, no? I just have a flight to catch later." He blurted it out, startled by the question. That didn't seem to fly as an explanation, so he stumbled on. "I, ah, bought the Gillies' farmhouse up the road, but I can't stay long this trip. Has it been a while since anyone lived there?"
"Lived?" The old woman took his money in one gnarled hand and opened the cash drawer with the other. "No one's lived there since Martha Gillies died in, oh, I suppose it was nineteen-eighty or so."
"So it's been empty all this time?" That would explain the condition of the house.
"Well, no, not empty." The old man rummaged under the counter and found a plastic spoon for him. "Martha's boy, George, had the place. 'Course he was a professor of something or other in the states. Only came up in the summers. Was two years back, I think, he died up there on a visit."
Taro thanked them, gathered up his lunch, and drove back to the house. The house had two potential ghosts in it, which raised another frightening possibility. Did he attract ghosts? Did his presence wake them or rouse them or whatever one did with ghosts? If he did, why cleaning ghosts? The whole thing gave him a headache, and he still needed to make the drive to Charlottetown. He twitched as he locked up the house, turned off the empty fridge, and gathered his things to leave. A constant itching pressure between his shoulder blades convinced him something watched him. He wanted to run out of the house, but he had the bad feeling that running attracted attention. From whatever it was.
These peaks and valleys of fear had to be bad for him. His chest ached. His stomach was in knots. His head throbbed constantly with a low-grade ache that turned up a notch when his anxious thoughts escalated. Taro leaned his head against the steering wheel, forcing himself to breathe slowly. Home. Everything would feel better once he got home.
He didn't realize quite how tense every inch of him was until he nearly sobbed during touchdown at LaGuardia. The tiny grandmother sitting next to him reached over to pat his knee.
"Flying can be hard on a person," she murmured.
Unable to get any words out past his clenched jaw, Taro nodded and concentrated on relaxing one abused muscle at a time. Flying wasn't the problem, but he couldn't just blurt out what was behind his fear. No, ma'am, I'm being followed. Possibly by a ghost. Or several. Either that or I've been having psychotic breaks.
He didn't care at all how bad he looked when he trudged to his door. Even when a woman walking toward him sidled away to the other side of the hall, he was too exhausted to apologize for looking like patient zero for the zombie apocalypse. Jittery from caffeine so he wouldn't fall asleep in the cab, he couldn't rest yet. So he sorted his laundry, checked to see if Andel had arranged for the promised grocery delivery (bless her, she had), made an omelet for dinner, and with a full stomach, flumped onto the couch to kick off his shoes and watch bad television. The dishes could wait a few minutes.
Despite the restless itching in his limbs, he fell asleep during a Gunsmoke episode.
He woke up half-sprawled on the sofa with a wicked crick in his neck and his right arm numb from being stuck under the structural collapse of his body. Light streamed through his floor-to-ceiling living room windows, but the quality of light was more brazen that it should be. Morning?
A groan and a barked shin on the coffee table later, he staggered to the kitchen. Nine a.m.
When he reached over to fill the coffee carafe with water, he froze. The dishes he'd left to soak in the sink had vanished.