Living alone in the house was a new experience for Sybil and one that she didn’t dread as much as she had expected. Gradually the absence of Paul hurt less and less, although there were times when she felt his restless spirit was lingering around her. Of course she realized that this might be just her imagination and dismissed the notion.
In the next few days, however, she read enough about paranormal psychology not to dismiss the notion entirely. Paul had died in a way which was generally considered to provide a potential base for lingering in the earth’s sphere; in other words, he might well have become what is commonly called a ghost.
Paul a ghost? What an idea! But there were little things that made her wonder. To begin with, she never felt alone in the house. Even when she took a bath and closed the door tightly behind her (a silly thing to do since she knew there was no one else in the house), she had the uncanny feeling that she was being watched by someone or something that she could not see. Despite her growing psychic abilities, and she now knew she had them, she could not really make out what this someone or something was; she began to wonder whether her nerves were playing tricks on her.
But she discarded this explanation the first Thursday after the renewal of the lease. That day had been particularly warm. Coming out from the city after work, having a quick dinner and then spending another thirty or forty-five minutes working in the garden had made her tired; she had intended to take a quick bath and then go to bed. She was standing in front of the bathroom mirror, drying herself, when she suddenly felt a trembling sensation. At first the notion came to her that an earthquake was taking place, but she immediately dismissed such an idea because she had never heard of earthquakes in this part of the country. The mirror began to sway back and forth as if moved by unseen hands; a cold breeze swept through the bathroom and chilled her to the very bones. Then she noticed a flickering light near the ceiling. As she looked up, the light moved farther down until it came face to face with her, less than a foot away. Standing naked in front of the mirror and staring at this flickering light, she felt a strange lack of fear. Yet she was unable to move, almost as if she were paralyzed.
And then there was an enveloping sensation, as if someone were putting his arms around her body. There was no mistaking it. These were the arms of a man, and she let out a terrified scream. But the man’s arms were not hurting her. They were fondling her. Could it be Paul, she thought? Could his spirit be trying to make love to her from the afterlife?
“Is it you, Paul? Is it you?” she said.
Immediately the sensation ceased. The spirit or whatever it was, had completely left.
Hastily she got dressed and went out of the bathroom. She returned to the living room, unable to go to sleep right away. If it hadn’t been Paul’s spirit, who then had tried to make love to her in the bathroom? Certainly not the vengeful Indian chief. Could it be one of the murder victims of the DeFeo family? But she dismissed this notion also because she realized that none of the victims had been young men; there were only an old couple and young children.
Who then, or what had put its strong arms around her? The puzzle remained and so did her nervousness. She decided to take some drops, something she had picked up in a health food shop that shouldn’t cause her any side effects; hopefully, she thought, she would soon be fast asleep. In the morning things might look different.
Sybil’s continued presence in the accursed house did not escape the notice of the local townspeople. Nothing more appeared in the local press, to be sure, and very few tourists came by, at any rate no more than used to in years gone by. Occasionally, a car would drive slowly past the house, and people would crane their necks, pointing the house out to each other; but no one rang her doorbell and she felt it unnecessary to ask for police protection from overly eager tourists or curious townsfolk.
The second week of her residence in the house passed relatively uneventfully. She hoped that perhaps the whole month would be peaceful. Then she would return to the city and resume her life, shattered though it was because of Paul’s death. At least she would be free from any further misgivings or problems of a psychic nature. She longed to be among normal people again and to be in a world where things are pretty much understood and predetermined—a world where the unexpected and the unseen have little or no place.
Then one day somebody left a little book on her doorstep. In the morning, as she rushed out to leave for the city, she found it. The book was called The Amityville Curse and it dealt with the alleged curse put on the house and on any of those who dared live in it. While she thought the book was fiction, she nevertheless read it from cover to cover.
Reading it destroyed her precarious tranquility. It made her realize that the curse had not been lifted by Paul’s death, nor by the finding and proper dispersing of Don Pedro’s treasure. What then did the spirits want? she asked herself with a certain amount of bitterness. What more could she do to pacify them? But she knew at the same time that the answers would not come to her easily.
When she returned from the city that evening and opened the front door, a heavy piece of plaster fell to the ground, narrowly missing her. She had not noticed it being loose, and yet there it came, crashing down from the ceiling. She shuddered, thinking that, had she been two or three inches further inside the house, she would soon be lying in the hospital or even in the morgue. Was someone trying to tell her something? she wondered.
When she had cleared away the debris, she proceeded to prepare dinner for herself. To her surprise she found that the cupboard was almost completely bare, for she had forgotten to shop the previous weekend. What was she to do? She did not feel like driving to a local restaurant. She was tired and wanted to go to sleep. Under the circumstances she decided to telephone a nearby grocery store, order a few simple things and prepare a makeshift dinner for herself. No sooner decided than done; the grocery promised delivery within the next twenty minutes.
She stretched out on the sofa in the living room, waiting for the boy from the grocery store to arrive. As she did so, she noticed a strange pattern of light playing on the ceiling. At first she thought it was due to passing cars, but when she got up and checked the windows she realized that there was no way that the lights could be the result of something outside. The origin had to be elsewhere. By now the lights were quite pronounced; they formed a flickering and ever-changing pattern—now round, now oval, now starlike. They were dancing on the ceiling as if to challenge her to make out what they might possibly be. As she observed the strange goings on Sybil became alarmed. Here was something that she could not readily account for in terms of normal physics. She rose from the couch and went directly beneath where the lights were doing their peculiar display on the ceiling. She could now make out something more than just lights: faintly etched inside the largest light was the outline of a human face!
“My God!” she exclaimed, realizing that she was witnessing another manifestation. At this moment the doorbell rang. Quickly she went to the door and opened it. It was the grocery boy.
“Come in. Come in,” she said, perhaps more eagerly than necessary. The young man, a sandy-haired boy of perhaps eighteen or nineteen, stepped inside the house, carrying the supplies down the corridor, and then to the left into the kitchen. She paid the boy, gave him a generous tip and accompanied him to the front door. She watched him get into his little Volkswagen. For no reason she could have put into words, she stood at the door waiting for the car to drive off, down the tree-lined street and back to the village.
At first, the boy had trouble getting the engine started, but he finally did, and the car drove off. Sybil was ready to return to the house, when she saw the car swerve from the right side of the road, cross to the left side, and drive with full impact into a tree. She could not believe her eyes: there was the sickening sound of a crash, and then utter silence!
My God, she thought, he’s killed himself! She ran out, leaving the door wide open, to see whether she could help. The accident had occurred perhaps a half block away from the house. When she reached the site of the crash, she realized that she had come too late. There, hanging out of the half-open door, was the delivery boy, his neck obviously broken.
Sybil somehow made it back to the house, somehow closed the door behind her, somehow summoned the police. After an ambulance had taken the body away, a police officer came to question her, since she was the only witness to the accident. There was very little to tell him except that the car had inexplicably crossed over to the other side of the road and then made directly for one of the trees.
“I can’t understand it,” she kept saying over and over again.
The officer nodded. “These things do happen sometimes,” he said. “Perhaps the boy wasn’t well or perhaps he didn’t know how to drive.”
“I don’t know. He seemed a very responsible, healthy boy to me,” Sybil said. “I can’t understand how this could have happened.”
The officer shrugged and left. Sybil was more shaken than ever. She sat down again in her living room and decided to meditate. As she did so, she had the feeling she was leaving her body and floating into the air. She had by now read enough about out-of-body experiences and astral projections to realize that this was nothing supernatural as such; it occurred to many people. She knew that sometimes people who are at the verge of sleep will actually travel outside their body and then return to it; often they would not even be aware of it, but put their experiences down to having had a very vivid dream.
Despite this knowledge which she possessed consciously, she was terrified when she suddenly found herself floating down the corridor and up the stairs to the second story of the house. Something or someone drew her into a room to the right of the stairs, the room in which young DeFeo had murdered his father! And there, big as life, she saw the dead man with his bullet wound as fresh as the day he had been shot all those years ago.
Sybil let out a scream of horror and instantly was pulled back into her physical body, rushing through the air and feeling the walls between her and the living room. She landed inside her physical body with a thud, trembling with the horror of her most recent experience. Her eyes were wide open now and she realized that she had brought on this particular state through her meditation. Determined not to let this happen again, she made herself ready for bed.
But then the thought struck her. What if the phenomena in the house were to increase day by day? Should she just leave and let the people who had been living in the house prior to their arrival cope with it? Immediately she rejected the proposal as cowardly. She owed it to Paul’s memory not to run away.
No, she promised herself, she was going to deal with the matter as rationally as possible. But the next step, she decided, was to call on the services of the medium again. Perhaps Mrs. Mason could figure out what had to be done to lift the curse and to bring peace to those on the other side of the curtain—and also to Sybil herself.
She ran to the telephone. To her immense relief, she heard Mrs. Mason’s voice after the second ring. Sybil blurted out her story. The medium readily offered to come the following evening, once she had heard of the tragedy that had recently occurred.
That night, Sybil slept soundly. If she had any dreams, she did not recall them on awakening.