19

THE VISITOR

June 20

When Rosie woke, she did so with a sense of disorientation.

Where, where, where—where was she?

For a while she wasn’t sure.

For a while she felt as if she’d been chloroformed and dragged away to some strange place of captivity. Drugged and leaden and alien to herself.

The mysteries of this house.

She swung her legs over the side of the bed and ran her fingers through her hair. There was a dryness at the back of her throat and her tongue felt heavy—slight hangover symptoms, maladies from the bottom of a bottle. She rose, parted the drapes, then stepped out onto the balcony.

She looked down into the grove of trees and then moved the length of the balcony.

When she turned the corner to find herself facing the sea, she discovered Tommy leaning silently against the rail. She paused for a moment, watching the boy’s face, seeing the paleness of his skin. There was something so intensely vulnerable in the way he looked that she didn’t want to speak.

He turned to her.

“Hi, Tommy,” she said.

He smiled in a halfhearted way. And she wondered what this house had done to him, how it might have touched him, whether he had had his own personal encounters with whatever inhabited the place. Whatever, she thought. A spectral tenant.

“You look blue,” she said. Quaint. The wrong expression. Kids didn’t use blue these days. They talked about being bummed out.

“I’m okay,” and he shrugged. “I guess.”

She touched him lightly, stroking his shoulder. Beneath her fingertips she could feel him tremble a little.

He was gazing out toward the ocean.

She could tell he was struggling for words, a way to communicate something to her.

I know, she thought.

I know what it is, Tommy.

You feel it just the same as everybody else in this house.

Only you don’t want to say anything because you think it’s going to sound damned silly, don’t you?

She rubbed his shoulder again.

“What’s on your mind, Tommy?”

“Nothing.”

“Come on. You can tell me.”

He rapped his knuckles against the rail for a time. Suddenly she was reminded of Lindy’s withdrawals, her little shells into which she retreated—but she had the feeling Tommy’s were different somehow, easier to break down, easier to thrust aside. You couldn’t ever be sure of anything, though, when it came to the minefields of adolescence. There were explosions when you least expected them.

“It’s this house, isn’t it?” she said.

He faced her, shuffling his feet on the wooden boards. “I don’t like it here.”

“Why?”

He stared up at the sky for a time. As she waited for an answer to her question, she thought, He’s right, he should go home, we should all go home—what kind of madness was it to stay here anyhow? But it seemed to her that it was another kind of madness to just get up and run. It was an admission of fear, a yielding to a certain kind of spiritual terrorism. Flight, she thought, had never been an answer for anything. Besides, in daylight when the sun illuminated dark corners, and the world was brighter, the weird events seemed less strange—indeed, they were interesting now rather than frightening. It was almost as if she’d taken one step back from all the happenings and was seeing them now in a detached, academic fashion. Dr. Rosie Andersen, parapsychologist. Intrepid explorer of the beyond. If, in fact, there really was a beyond …

She repeated her question but Tommy answered only indirectly. He said, “Would you do me a favor? No matter how weird it seems?”

“Sure.”

“Okay. Would you come inside my room?”

“If that’s what you want.”

He was already moving toward the door of his room. He hesitated before pushing it open, and when he finally did he ushered her inside ahead of himself. She stepped inside and paused. “Okay. What do you want me to do now?”

He pointed. “Open the closet.”

“The closet?”

“Yeah.”

She smiled at him. “You got it.”

She laid her hand against the handle, turned it, drawing the door open. “Okay. The closet is open.”

“What do you see?”

She gazed into the dark space. “Some books. Some boxes.”

“And that’s all?”

“Yeah. Except it’s cold in there.” And it was, cold and damp and musty. “What did you expect me to see, Tommy?”

“I don’t know.”

“You must have expected something, kid.” She watched him for a time; he still hadn’t entered the room, lingering on the threshold of the balcony door as if he were deathly afraid to come all the way inside, scared of that kind of commitment.

“Do you … hear anything?” he asked.

She listened.

She leaned forward into the dark chill space and she listened.

The imagination.

Just the imagination, she thought.

The faint sound of something whispering from above.

Like paper trapped in a breeze.

Like the steady beat of a moth’s wings against glass.

Nothing really.

She turned once more to Tommy. “I don’t know if I hear anything, Tommy. I can’t really say. What did you expect?”

The boy didn’t answer.

Try another approach, she thought. “What did you see in here?”

“I’m not sure …”

“You can do better than that, Tommy.”

“I can’t,” he answered. “I can’t do any better.”

She could hear something stifled in the way he spoke, as if just behind his words there were choked-back tears. She looked inside the closet again, staring upward. That same faint sound drifting down from the dark overhead. That same steady rustling. And she wanted to say, Look, I think we’ve got a bad case of mice, kid, nothing more than that—but she wouldn’t have sounded convincing. Then if it wasn’t some rodent infestation, what was making the sound? Something stuck up there in a draft? Always seeking the logical, Rosie, always hunting down the spoor of the rational. And never quite managing to find it.

“What is it, Tommy? What is it that’s scared you?”

“I’m not scared!”

“You don’t exactly seem willing to come into your own room, so I figure something must have upset you.”

This time Tommy didn’t respond. He just stood in the doorway, arms hanging at his side, his face strangely defiant all at once.

“Look, Tommy, it’s no big deal to come right out and tell me what happened to upset you.”

“It sounds so stupid,” he said.

“Tell me anyway.”

“The door. The door keeps opening and closing. Then sometimes it seems to lock itself.”

“Lock itself?”

“I told you it would sound stupid!”

“It’s not stupid, Tommy.” There. The tone of reason, of adult calm. Something she didn’t altogether feel. But something she had to go through.

She watched him turn around and go back out on the balcony and then she followed him, calling his name. Outside she saw him move around the corner of the house and she found him staring down into the trees. She put her arms around him, hugged him against her body.

“What else, Tommy? What else happened in that room?”

“Nothing else.”

“Come on.”

“Nothing,” he said again.

“Okay okay okay.”

She moved away from him and she thought, He needs a little time, a little space—then maybe he’d come out and tell her what had happened in his bedroom. Maybe he just needed the privacy of his own thoughts for a bit before he raised the subject again. It didn’t do any good to be irritated with him or try to force him to say what was on his mind.

She looked out beyond the trees in the direction of the highway.

And she saw something moving out there. A vehicle of some kind, trailing a dark pall of exhaust fumes.

She said, “I don’t believe it. Look. There’s life on the planet.”

She watched as the vehicle came closer: it was a battered pickup truck, an old rusted thing burning oil profusely along the highway. It started to slow down just beyond the grove and then it turned along the pathway to the house. Rosie saw it come to a halt just behind the station wagon.

A man jumped down from the cab. He raised his face and looked up at the balcony, pushing his baseball cap back along his skull. He was short and muscular, dressed in faded coveralls. As he moved toward the house, he raised an arm in the air and called out something that Rosie couldn’t quite catch. She walked toward the balcony stairs and started to go down. Tommy following listlessly a little way behind.

The visitor was standing at the foot of the stairs, smiling; he had small yellow teeth and a stubble of beard on his jaw. When he saw Rosie he stuck out a hand, which she accepted and held a moment, conscious of the man’s sweat against her own skin.

“Mullery,” he said. “Clyde Mullery,” and he shifted his feet back and forth as if he were embarrassed by his own name.

“I’m Rosie. And this is Tommy.”

“Nice to meet you folks,” the man said. He looked at the house in the manner of someone assessing a property for its sale value. Then he glanced quickly at Tommy before he spoke again. “I meant to get out here a few days back. But I come down with this darn cold,” and he rapped himself in the chest with his knuckles. “It’s only lifting now.” He coughed for a moment. Then he reached out and touched the handrail, shaking it a couple of times, watching it shift back and forth. “Beats me how this place still stands. Beats me. Should’ve been in the sea long ago, you ask me.”

Rosie studied the man, wondering about the purpose of his visit. He examined the house as if he were the proprietor, but the place belonged, as she recalled, to somebody named Callahan. So what was Clyde Mullery’s role around here? Now she watched as he stepped around her and climbed up onto the porch, where he examined the screen door. She was aware of Lindy beyond the screen, her face in shadow.

“Figure this needs to be replaced,” Clyde Mullery said, and he took a small notebook from his coveralls and jotted something down with a pencil.

Rosie followed him. “Are you some kind of caretaker?” she asked.

“Old man Callahan asked me to keep an eye on his property, that’s all. I ain’t exactly a caretaker.” He pulled the screen door back and forward, listening to the hinges. “Four of you here, is that right? Two women, two kids.” He looked at Rosie as if he were racking his brain to understand why in hell people would want to rent this godforsaken place.

“Four of us, right,” Rosie said. And then Clyde Mullery went inside the house. He stood in the middle of the living room and looked up at the ceiling.

“Got any complaints?” he asked.

Where do you want me to begin, she asked herself. Only some unexplained, apparently psychic phenomena, nothing to trouble yourself over, for sure. “Well,” she said, and she hesitated. “Well, we were led to believe the place would be freshly painted and clean before we moved in.”

“Who told you that? Callahan’s lawyers? Never trust anything any lawyer ever says.” And Clyde Mullery smiled. A private joke, Rosie thought.

“We had it in writing,” she said.

“Well,” Mullery said and let the matter drop. He stepped inside the kitchen. He went to the sink and peered into it. Then he turned and looked at the Ouija board that lay on the floor. He bent down and picked it up and set it on the table.

“So. How do you folks like it out here?”

Rosie shrugged. Tommy and Lindy were standing in the kitchen doorway behind her now.

“It’s off the beaten track, that’s for sure,” Mullery said. “I guess you folks must really enjoy solitude, huh?” And he was smiling again in a way that Rosie was beginning to find a little infuriating. She folded her arms and watched as the man looked once more at the Ouija board. But she couldn’t tell from his expression if he understood what it was. Then he turned to stare at the kids for a moment before he said, “Nice-looking pair. Are they yours?”

Rosie shook her head. “Only the girl.”

Mullery glanced back at the Ouija. Then he was looking at Lindy this time in much the same way as he had looked at the house when he’d first arrived. Appraising, assessing—something in the expression made Rosie feel vaguely uneasy. “How old are you, kid?”

“Thirteen,” Lindy said, her tone of voice flat.

“Thirteen, huh.”

Mullery was silent, running the flat of his hand over the board as if he were searching its surface for some secret vibration. No, Rosie thought, I’m imagining this. This is just the hyperactive response of the overstimulated imagination. This house, the way this man looks at the kids, the solid presence of the board on the table—these elements had been casually tossed into the crucible of her imagination, that was all. On edge. Touchy. A little too sensitive. She needed to change the subject. To ventilate her feelings.

“I understand that Mr. Callahan doesn’t get around much,” she said.

“Yep. Keeps pretty much to himself, you could say.”

“I’d like to drive into the village one day and meet him.” This was called tossing a balloon in the air—if anybody knew anything about this house and its history it would have to be Callahan.

“He don’t see nobody. He don’t talk to nobody,” Mullery said. “He just sits. He’s pretty old. Eighty, maybe. Nobody knows for sure.”

He just sits, Rosie thought. She wondered what it would be like to just sit. She had an image of a man rocking back and forth in a darkened room, pale bony knuckles gripping the arms of a chair. She watched Mullery again as he lowered his head to the window, apparently checking the frame.

“Can I ask you a question, Mr. Mullery?”

“I can’t promise no answers,” he said.

Such hick coyness, she thought. Such backwater reticence. She asked, “Have you ever heard of anyone called Roscoe?”

“Roscoe?” Mullery tilted his head back a moment. “Roscoe, Roscoe, Roscoe, lemme see, lemme see.”

Rosie thought she could hear the cogs whirring in his brain.

“Roscoe, Roscoe, Roscoe,” he whispered. “I can’t say it rings any bells.”

Was it paranoia that made her feel Mullery was being slightly evasive here? Good Christ, this place, this spooky place—had it reduced her to paranoia? “Are you sure?” she asked.

“Sure as can be,” he answered. “Am I meant to know the name or something?”

“I thought it might be a former tenant.” Shooting in the dark, whistling in the wind.

“Nope. Last tenants were called Farmer. Come out of Atlanta, I guess. That would be maybe four years ago. Before that, well, I don’t rightly know on account of how I only been working for old man Callahan for four years.”

“Why was the house vacant for that length of time?”

Mullery shrugged. “You’d have to ask Callahan that. Guess he didn’t want to rent. Who knows?”

“What happened to the Farmers?” she asked.

“Happened? Nothing happened to them, so far as I know. They came out here for a couple weeks, then they went back home.” Mullery touched the glass pane lightly and appeared somewhat satisfied with what he saw. “What do you want to know about some previous tenants for anyhow? They leave something behind?”

“Oh. Just some kids’ books, I guess. Nothing important.”

Mullery crossed the kitchen floor, then stepped back into the living room. Rosie followed, disappointed by his answers. What had she been hoping for anyhow? Something simple, something that would just wrap up the whole puzzle and present her with a solution? Such as what?

“Well,” Mullery said when he reached the front door. “I guess you people are just fine. I’ll get round to picking up a replacement for the screen door. But it takes time. You got to order these things.” He shook his head. And then he was crossing the porch and going down the steps. Rosie watched him; halfway along the path toward his pickup he stopped and turned around. “Roscoe, huh?”

“Roscoe,” she said. “That’s right.”

“Roscoe.” He pushed his baseball cap to the back of his head and looked up at the sky. “Nope. I don’t get a thing. Sorry, lady.”

“Why don’t you ask Mr. Callahan about the name?”

Mullery didn’t answer.

Rosie saw him get inside his pickup, heard the engine scream to life, watched the air turn black with fumes. She continued to observe him as he backed out of the driveway, then he was gone along the narrow blacktop toward Cochrane Crossing. She went back indoors and moved across the living-room floor, pausing when she heard the sound of voices coming from the kitchen. Lindy and Tommy, talking in low, furtive tones. Some adolescent secret, she thought. Something that belonged in a world to which she did not have access.

She went to the doorway and peered round.

Tommy was sitting at the table, Lindy standing beside him.

They were examining the Ouija board.

And Lindy had her arm against Tommy’s shoulder and her hand, fingers splayed, was rubbing lightly against his back.

Rubbing very lightly.

Rosie stepped back, unnoticed by the kids.

Intimacy, she thought.

A strange, unexpected intimacy. Like the closeness of lovers.

As she moved toward the stairs, she felt as if she had just trespassed on a situation in which she had absolutely no rights. None at all.

Tommy and Lindy. Lindy and Tommy.

She climbed the stairs. Was there something going on between them?

I am imagining things again.

That’s all.

Just imagining them.

They’re only kids.