CHAPTER
5
Gustav Svensson

Van Epps disappointed me—not for lack of information I could at least infer, but for lack of honesty with me, his old compatriot in skepticism.

He asked me about my walk through the town. I recounted my impressions and introduced Brenda. He asked if we’d noticed the overburden of mystics and charlatans, and of course we had.

“Places like . . . Earthsong’s Psychic Readings,” he said with a sardonic wag of his head. “So typical.”

How notable that he brought up the fortune-teller without my mentioning her. I pursued it. “We gave her a try, as a matter of fact. She put on quite a show.”

He sneered, he scoffed, he chided me for wasting my time and money.

“She spoke of a missing child,” I said with a mockery to match his. “Obviously, a ‘reading’ that had nothing to do with us.”

He laughed along with me but drummed his fingers nervously and would not dwell on the subject.

From there, things went into a limbo that became more and more constricting. We went to several homes around the neighborhood and town, but the reactions we got were as Van Epps predicted from his own experience: No one talked about the House.

After that, a day passed, then another, and we became like survivors in a lifeboat, stuck in close proximity with nowhere else to go. Van Epps and I fell into quarrels over old information when we weren’t exhausting each other in protracted academic discussions. His house was sizable enough for his guests but not sizable enough to prevent friction between myself and the two women.

Andi, lacking something to do, began jabbering about patterns: The dimensions of the cupboard doors were golden rectangles, the teakettle played a continuous tone progressing through ten degrees of the scale and ending on an accidental, the pattern of the living room carpet repeated every forty-eight inches, which was the same number of flowers in the pattern multiplied by four, so there had to be more twelves or multiples of twelve somewhere. There was no turning her off.

Brenda, always edgy, wandered, explored, got to know some people, but the idleness weighed upon her and she simply could not find something to like. She didn’t like the town, she didn’t like the house, she didn’t care for Van Epps and, of course, she could not accommodate herself to me—a mutual feeling I had no incentive to correct.

And all along, Van Epps kept pressing us: “It’ll show up again. Count on it. You’ll see.”

Then came October 6. The day held no significance for me, but for Andi, it was the number six, the number the Institute seemed so fond of, which was divisible into twelve, which constituted the pattern she was waiting for. “It’s the sixth! I think we’re going to get something today!”

I got out of the house—alone. That was the point.

I walked the same loop around the neighborhood, past the same trees, hedges, yards, and yapping dogs I’d memorized by now, vexed by the monotony, the sameness, the cyclical repetition . . .

Until I noticed a different sensation. Beneath my vexation, a sense of gloom moved in like a mood swing on a cloudy day . . . feelings associated with the memory of a woman I could not have . . . shadows of regret . . . anger . . . the day I tore off my clerical collar.

Blast! I had long ago buried all such issues. It had to be the town, the idleness, and now my being exiled as it were, a solitary soul on an empty sidewalk in a strange town. I dashed the memories from my mind—

And felt a sense of foreboding as if being followed. Watched.

I looked about. No one behind me—

The moment my eyes came forward, I saw only twenty feet away . . . Him? It? I will use the term specter to convey the appearance of the man and, I admit, the chill, the danger I felt. He was motionless, like a post. His eyes, pasted over like those of a dead animal, were locked on me. How he could make such an instant appearance and from where, I could not tell.

He was dressed like an aged mariner: old slicker, drooping hat, work boots. His complexion was cold and gray, and he was dripping wet, standing in a puddle of water though it was a rainless day.

He took a step toward me, and then another, the grim expression steady as a mask. Intuitively, I considered my size and strength and so resolved to stand my ground. The boots squished and left wet footprints on the street. The slicker dripped as if being rained upon.

Now he seemed he would move by me, so I stepped aside. He passed by, his pasty eyes probing me, and it had to have been Van Epps’ prior description that made me feel he was looking into me, knew me, knew my sins.

The specter’s back was to me now. I fumbled for my cell phone to snap a photo. Even as I composed the picture, he stopped and looked back. Click. A photo I might fear from that day on.

What? The man gave his head a little jerk as if to say, Come this way.

I followed him at a distance even as I swiped and tapped my phone to raise Andi’s number. When she answered, I found myself whispering. “Come quickly, all of you.”

Oh, the frustration!

“Come where?” she said. “Where are you?”

Somewhere in Port Avalon, blast it! “I don’t know the street name. I’m near the big white house with the black mutt.”

“Well, where’s that?”

I came to a street sign. “Mossyrock.” The man kept walking around a corner, up a hill. “Make that 48th.”

“Forty-eight!” she exclaimed.

I hated how she could make me curse, especially to her. “Do not start, Andi! Just get down here!”

She indicated that Van Epps knew where I was. I tapped Off and holstered the phone.

The specter rounded a wooded corner and went out of sight. I ran to catch sight of him again.

There he was, relentlessly walking, squishing, dripping.

And just beyond him, at the end of the street where, I’m sure, nothing but woods had been, was a house. Two-story Victorian, dull purple, richly detailed, turreted, with a covered porch and sleepy front windows.