The truth was, I needed to stop messing around and figure out if Lucy was really possessed, or if she was just a very sick little girl living in a haunted house. I still thought Will was half-cracked, but now I figured his sanity had more to do with his daughter being sick than him having a mental breakdown.
Finally, about five, the sounds stopped. Relief wasn’t the word for it. It was more like I felt that if I went to sleep now, I could actually get some rest. I rolled over and drifted off. That’s when the dream began.
###
I was wandering in a great forest, but it was hard to see. The fog was so thick, I could only see the ground right in front of me. The trees, well, I only saw them when I was right on top of them. It was like a forest of evergreens without the smell of pine. I couldn't smell anything.
Then I heard it, the strange choppy growl. I froze in place, not knowing if the sound was in front of me or behind me. I began to sweat. The fear made me sticky.
“I don’t think you want to go that way, mister.” I heard a child’s voice say.
“Why not?” I asked.
“Cause the soul eater lives there.”
Then I felt a hand on my shoulder.
###
I jerked awake. Will pulled his hand back as if I’d shocked him.
“You okay, Jimmy?”
I sat up and looked around. There was nothing there. Will was standing over me. There was nothing weird about the library. It looked perfectly normal. “Jesus Christ.”
Will scratched at his head for a moment. “Guess I should have mentioned the dreams.”
I couldn’t believe it. I already told him it was important for him to tell me everything. Now, he was still keeping shit from me. It would have been nice to know that strange dreams had been happening to him. But why would he assume that I would have one? I couldn’t explain it, and I wasn’t happy. This already wasn’t going well. “That’s it,” I said. “If you keep something from me one more time, I’m going home.”
Will stepped back, his eyes apologetic. “Jimmy, don’t. I’m sorry. I was hoping you would just sleep. I didn’t know if the dreams just affected me and Tor or not.”
I nodded. I wasn’t sure if I bought his explanation, but it would have to do. “All right. Today, I want the whole story, but first, I want a shower. Then, I want some breakfast. After that, we are going to have a long talk.”
###
I got my shower in Will and Tor’s master bathroom. The bathroom was just as crazy opulent as the rest of the house. There was lots of pink marble, and the faucets were made of gold. The marble floor was heated. I supposed that when it got really cold, having heated floors would come in handy, but what was the use of marble if it didn’t act like marble?
I was uncomfortable using the bathroom. It was just too fancy for my taste. I wiped down the shower stall when I was done with my towel and hung it on the towel rack to dry.
When I was finished with everything, I went downstairs to breakfast. It took me a couple of wrong turns, but eventually, I was able to find the kitchen. Tor and Will were sitting at the table. Will was eating a muffin. Tor looked exhausted.
“Hello, Jim,” Tor said. “I wasn’t up to cooking this morning. I hope coffee and muffins are okay.”
I smiled. “Lady, my usual breakfast is coffee and whatever I can scrape together. Believe me, muffins are fine.”
She smiled.
I sat down at the table, poured myself some coffee from the carafe into the cup that was waiting for me at my place at the table. Then, I helped myself to a muffin. It was chocolate chip.
“What’s on the agenda?” Tor asked.
Will grabbed her hand. “If he is going to help, he has to know everything, Tor. Otherwise, I don’t know what else to do.”
“But the last time-“
“What do you mean, the last time?” I asked. I couldn’t not ask. Here again was something I wasn’t told. It was not instilling confidence in Will as far as I was concerned. He was walking a very fine line with me. So what I hadn’t brought my car. I’m sure I could find a ride out of town one way or another.
Will sighed. “I went to the local priest first. It was he who recommended she go into the hospital.”
I tapped my fingers on the table. “And this was the hospital that wanted to do shock treatments?”
“Yes,” Tor said.
I nodded. I was glad I didn’t jump to conclusions and yell at him again, but the secrecy was really getting to me. Will needed to handle this better. There was no way the church would believe anything about the house, about Lucy, if he kept keeping secrets.
“I mean it this time, Will,” I said. “No more secrets.”
He looked at my eyes. I knew my eyes had grown dark. They always did when I was angry, but they were a help to me. When my eyes went dark, people shut up and began to listen to what I had to say. My mother thought it was something magical. I had a more realistic view — my blue eyes looked darker when I held my head a certain way. I did this when I was angry. It gave a Hell of an effect, one that had a completely logical explanation. That’s what I had to do with Lucy, rule out all logical explanations surrounding her. If I had none, she was probably possessed. The chances of me finding no logical explanations for anything were very slim, and it was what I was banking on. I wanted something to come out and explain this shit, because if it was possession, I was scared shitless and wanted no part of it.
Will coughed, and I lowered my head.
“What do you need?” Tor asked.
I looked at her. Now here was someone who had some sense. “Just my things. We can do this wherever you want.”
She paused, thinking. “Can we do it in here?”
“I don’t see why not.” I got up from the table. “Give me a minute.” I walked into the hallway, down the hall and into the library. I dug through my bag and retrieved my notebook, a pen and my Roman Ritual. Then, I left the library and went back into the kitchen.
“I have a question,” Tor said when I walked into the room.
“Okay.” I sat down at the table and placed everything on top of it.
“If you think she’s possessed… is there a chance you could do it?” she asked.
“Do what?”
“The exorcism.”
Here we go again. Somehow it amazed me how little people understood about the Catholic Church. Technically, anyone can do an exorcism, whether it works or not is another story. Not that exorcisms by priests always worked. The way I understood it was that in order to be an exorcist, you have to be pure of heart and mind. While I tried to be a good person, “pure” certainly wasn’t a word I could call myself. “If you want a church sanctioned exorcism, they will appoint an exorcist. I can assure you, I will not be on that list.”
“Why not?” she asked.
I smiled then. “Because I’m not a priest. Think of it this way. Say you went to college to become a nurse. You thought that was your life’s calling. You finished school, tried to do a good job. Then, you have a patient, who for some inexplicable reason decides they hate you. Instead of a normal person who voices their complaints, this patient reports you to your superiors with allegations that aren’t entirely true.” I stared at my hands on the table.
I took a sip of coffee. “So you go to the predetermined meeting so you can give your side of the story. Unfortunately, the complainer is a well respected member of the community, and your superiors choose to believe her over anything you have to say. In my case, I refused their punishment, allowed them to kick me out of the church and found something else to do with my life.”
I looked up at Tor. She appeared to be thinking.
“What if the church doesn’t believe?” she asked.
“Well, I guess we’ll figure that out if and when it happens.” I arranged my things and turned to the section on exorcism in the Ritual. There was a list of things that “proved” possession. I was supposed to disprove it. “So, where do you want to begin?”
&nb
sp; Chapter Seven
The Story
“Well,” Will said, “I already told you about the town, but when Tor saw the house in person, she just fell for it.” He fingered his coffee mug and turned towards Tor. “I’ll admit I was being a bit of an ass.”
“When aren’t you a bit of an ass?” Tor asked. She turned slightly away from him. This was definitely a place of conflict. That could possibly explain their bad dreams. My own, I didn’t want to think about.
I blinked. Open hostility seemed to be the theme of the morning. I don’t know if it was stress or what, but damn.
“What Will is trying to say is that I had already talked to Momma about the house. He wasn’t real happy about it, but I didn’t care. The house was to be my Christmas present.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Who gets a house for Christmas?”
Will snorted. “The girl from Miracle on 34th Street and my wife.”
Tor’s eyes flashed. If Will wasn’t careful, she was going to kill him.
I scratched my ear. “Anyways, so you got the house. What was it like?”
“It’s was pretty much what you see now,” Will said. “The furniture came with the house, and except for Lucy’s bedroom and ours, the living room, and this table, we just kept things as they were.”
“The furniture was too lovely to get rid of,” Tor said.
I nodded. From the tone in her voice, I could tell there was more to it than that. I really didn’t care about the furniture, not if it didn’t affect Lucy.
Will cleared his throat. “So, we moved in roughly two weeks after closing. Lucy alternated between fear of living in a new place and bursting with energy; a normal six-year-old.”
“It got a little strange when we were unpacking,” Tor said. She was staring into her coffee cup. “There is a huge attic, and that’s where we put the furniture we weren’t going to use from Lucy’s room. Lucy and I were looking around the attic while the movers were transferring furniture. Lucy found this huge old mirror. It was the strangest thing, oval with a tarnished gilt silver frame. It would have been lovely with a little work, and if the looking glass hadn’t been painted black.”
There were old legends about mirrors. Mirrors were supposed to be doorways to other worlds. Something about the silver backing was supposed to keep evil things from crossing over from the other side. What a mirror painted in black meant, I had no idea. “That’s a little unusual, isn’t it?”
“Stranger is the fact that Lucy loved the mirror. She even begged me to allow her to put it in her room.” She checked her hair with her hand. “Needless to say, I refused. Everything was fine for a few weeks after that, and then Lucy started acting up. Sometimes, she was very mean. Not the Lucy we knew at all.”
I was writing all of this down as quickly as I could. It reminded me of taking notes in seminary, and like seminary, my scribbling was never fast enough. “So, then what happened?”
She sighed. “We had a cat since it was a kitten—Miss Pretty. Lucy had picked her out.” Tor got up from the table, took away our coffee mugs and the muffins. She replaced it all with a soda for each of us.
I guess she needed a break from talking about it all. I could see the strain in her face. Some memories will do that to you—the ones that make you look much older than you are.
“I had left Lucy out back while I was in here doing dishes. Lucy liked to play in the backyard.” Her voice was starting to quiver.
I really hoped she wasn’t going to cry. I hated crying. Made me feel all uncomfortable and skitchy.
“I could look out the window and see her.” She pointed to the window left of the table above the sink. “Lucy was supposed to stay where I could see her.”
She sat back down, gripping her soda can so hard that I was afraid it was going to explode. Her knuckles were white.
“Then I heard a growl. It was not a cry from Lucy. It came from Miss Pretty.” She swallowed hard. “I ran outside and over by the hedge. Lucy was standing there poking Miss Pretty with a stick. I asked her what she was doing. She didn’t answer me. That was when I noticed that Miss Pretty wasn’t moving and—”
She collapsed into sobs, her head laying on her crossed arms on the table. Will stroked her head with his hand, and she sat up some and leaned on him. Her body heaved with her sobs. This was a tenderness I didn’t expect from them both given the way they’d acted earlier. I had a feeling that this back and forth nonsense was affecting Lucy. Exactly how, I couldn’t be sure, but a child could fake being sick because her parents were having problems. But Lucy had killed a cat. Killing an animal or animals was the sign of deep seated mental problems. In my opinion, the priest had been right to refer them to a psychiatrist for Lucy.
“Tor called me on my cell,” Will said. “I’d gone to the store… can’t remember why.” His body stiffened. “Lucy had gouged out the cat’s eyes, Jimmy. I… we didn’t know what to do. Lucy seemed nonchalant about it. We knew she needed help, but we didn’t know where to begin.”
I scratched my head. “That could be a lot of things.”
Will nodded. “That’s what I thought at first too.” He opened his soda and took a drink. “I buried Miss Pretty. Tor took Lucy upstairs and cleaned her up. She didn’t speak to either one of us. When I asked Lucy why she hurt Miss Pretty, all I could get out of her was, ‘Mr. Black showed me how.’”
I didn’t know who the Hell Mr. Black was, but the story rang oddly around in my head. I had that suffocating feeling again, the one I’d gotten when we drove through Sorrow’s Point. “Any idea who Mr. Black is?”
Will nodded. “That’s just it. There are two Mr. Blacks connected to this house. One long dead since the fifties, the other, well we bought the house from him.”
I began to chew the inside of my cheek. It was a bad habit, but it helped me think. My dentist was going to squawk over it, but I really didn’t care. It helped me think. “So, did you research the Black family?”
“That’s when I started thinking Lucy might be possessed,” Will said. He cracked his knuckles and gently pushed Tor off him. She settled herself and wiped the rest of her tears away with a napkin.
“The house we’re in actually has a name,” he said. “It’s called Blackmoor Hall. Black both because that was Archibald Black’s surname, and for the black seam of coal running through the grounds. Moor because the land reminded him of the moors of Scotland, his homeland.”
“And you found this out where?” I asked. As far as I knew, he played with a Ouija board to get the information.
Will smiled. “The public library. The town is actually really proud of Blackmoor Hall, despite its dark history. Believe me, I wish we would have known about it before we bought it, but I guess it just happened that way.”
“Or you could have used Google.” I tried really hard not to smirk, but it was hard. Did I feel sorry for Lucy? Hell, yes. Did I feel sorry for Will about the house? Not so much. Sometimes it pays to do your homework.
“It’s not on Google,” Will said.
I looked at him. “What do you mean? Everything is on the net these days.”
Will shook his head. “Not the Blackmoor articles. The library hasn’t gotten around to digitizing their microfiche library. At least that’s the official line.”
That explained it somewhat, but I sort of remembered something about how real estate agents are required by law to let you know if something had happened in the property you are about to buy. “And the Black family?”
He chuckled. “Oh, they are on Google. General information about how the Black brothers made their fortunes in coal. The truth behind Archibald Black’s death isn’t online though.”
“Sounds like that would make a Hell of a book,” I said.
Will looked at me sadly. “If Lucy wasn’t involved, I’d probably write it. As it is, I wouldn’t have heard about it if I hadn’t spoken to the librarian. When she found out I was the new owner of the ‘Black House,’ she said she couldn’t keep the truth from me. She was
n’t having that on her conscience.”
Tor jumped up, went to a cabinet near her stove and grabbed a cookbook. Then, she came back to the table and sat down. She began to flip through it. All of this really did freak her out. She was skittish, like a rabbit. Maybe she had a reason to be scared.
“What I’m about to tell you is what keeps me up at night,” Will said.
“Besides the noises?” I asked.
He laughed. “Yes, besides the noises. At any rate, when I walked into the library, I approached the front desk and asked the girl where I could find information about Blackmoor.” He shook his head. “It was like a movie. The whole library grew quiet. Then, this little old lady walked over to me from behind the desk. She told me to follow her. So, I followed her behind the circulation desk and into a glass windowed room. She closed the door behind me.”
He took a drink of his soda.
“She was a trip, telling me how the collection was delicate and that I could only touch the items while wearing gloves. I thought it was a little overkill, to be honest.”
“Maybe we should call her for help?” I asked. Partially, I was joking, but I also had memories of grumpy old librarians when I was in school. Some of them, I’m sure, could scare a demon.
Will looked at me. “That’s not funny.”
I looked back. “I didn’t mean it to be. She knows all this town history, she might be able to help.”
He ignored me. “Anyways, I looked around the room. She asked for my name, and I told her. She stared at me for several minutes, then asked me if I had any children.
“I told her I had a daughter. Then, she put her hand on her chest and went over to this wooden cabinet and opened it with a key. What she pulled out wasn’t what I expected. It was a huge book filled with aging newsprint that was enclosed in some sort of acid free plastic. She motioned for me to sit down at the desk, and I did. She put that book in front of me and flipped the pages until roughly the middle. She put on her glasses.”