On a sunny summer morning in New York City I received a call from a young lady which interested me a great deal. Her house in South Carolina, she claimed, was haunted, and would I be interested in coming down for a look around?
“If nothing else you could use it as an excuse to pop in on your mom and dad,” she went on. “They miss you, you know.”
“Ma’am,” I asked, taken aback, “how is it that you know I’m from South Carolina?”
A shrewd little laugh came through the line. “Jack, it’s me—Veronica Dehrer. Lord, you have been in the Big Apple for too long. Hello?”
I was silent for such a time it was a wonder she didn’t hang up the phone. Veronica Dehrer—the only girl I had ever loved. I had not heard her voice it since my junior year at high school. That was 1982.
“Jack? Are you there?”
“Yes,” I managed.
“Let’s not try and talk over the phone, okay? It’s been a long time and I’d like to see you again. Come down to Justinville and look at the house. There are more things going on here than you could ever believe.”
“It’s that bad?”
“Yes,” Veronica replied.
I hesitated, thinking of another client in Louisiana. He, too, was complaining of heavy activity, and oh how I could have used the money just then. But—
“What’s the address there, Veronica?”
“Number one fourteen, West Main Street.”
“I think I know that one. Is it the Greek revival?”
“Yes.”
“You bought it?” I wanted to know, surprised all over again. I had loved that house since my childhood.
“Yes. But I don’t sleep here at night anymore. I stay with a friend on Tate Street.”
The line garbled as she spoke this last. Veronica sounded like a woman talking underwater. But then it got better again.
“I mean the bumps,” she went on, “the thuds, the footsteps. The voices. What would you do? This is crazy, Jack. I’m crazy, maybe.
“No you’re not,” I insisted, sensing tears beneath her professions. “Listen, I’m going to bring some equipment with me. Reel-to-reel recorders, cameras, things like that. Techno-junk, basically, that’ll clutter up your living room but good.”
“I don’t mind. Come right to the house when you get here. I’m looking forward to seeing you.”
“Me too. I’m on my way, Vee. In fact if you want to meet me at the airport I can be on the first plane down—“
But I had to stop myself there. The line had gone flat dead.
***
I flipped through my address book and found the number for Louisiana, called it and said I’d be waylaid for awhile. This did not go over well, but I told the client it couldn’t be helped. Our conversation ended on a cold note, and as it turned out, put our business dealings to bed for good. Next, I dialed the number of my folks’ house in Justinville and told my mother I’d be coming for a visit.
“This is a shock,” she said, sounding underwhelmed. “When do you think you’ll be here?”
“To be honest I haven’t even called the airport yet, but I’m hoping to be on the earliest flight to Charleston. From there I can rent a car and drive up the coast.”
“I suppose so. But you’d better hurry, Jack. We’ve got a hurricane blowing in.”
I slapped my forehead. “Dammit! That’s right! How close is it now?”
“They’re saying twenty-four hours, but it’ll get really bad before then. The whole town’s been evacuated aside from the ten or fifteen families who decided to stick it out—along with your dad and me.”
“Are you sure that’s a good idea? Staying, I mean?”
“Not in the remotest sense of the word. But your father is your father.”
“So it was his idea?”
“Do I sound like I’m hopping up and down with joy at the prospect of being blown across the Atlantic?”
Minutes later I phoned a clerk at LaGuardia who informed me there would be a flight leaving for Columbia at 2:45. This brought a sigh of relief. Columbia was better anyway, being at least a hundred miles offshore. I thanked the clerk and left for my apartment to do some swift packing.
***
The plane ride was uneventful. We touched down under sunny skies at around 4:30, and over the next two hours, driving southeast in a rented minivan, I felt troubled by little to no anxiety. It wasn’t until I neared Mclellenville that the wind started to pick up, sweeping the trees in cool, hurried gasps. Heavy clouds pitched across the sky. I had the radio tuned to a weather station; it was calculated the storm would arrive at 8:30AM at the very latest, but the wind would be quite damaging well before then. Hail was also expected, though as yet not a single drop of rain had fallen. The entire coast was under a flood warning.
It was an astonishment then to see how vulnerable Veronica’s house looked. I recalled it as being a huge, dark manor; time had done nothing to exaggerate the memory. It had been built during the Greek revival period of the mid nineteenth century, at the very edge of Justinville’s West Main Street district. Its vast windows, appallingly bare, gaped at me as I approached. I was about to knock on the door when I heard a rap from above. I stepped back, and there, smiling through the clawing boughs at the upper west curtain, was Veronica. She made an inviting gesture with her hands. The door was unlocked and I stepped inside.
A small anteroom glowed beyond the threshold, its source of light a single candle set in a crooked sconce. Others like it flickered in the living room—where, I found, awaited Veronica. She stood near a burning fireplace, dressed in a long gown of navy blue. Her face wore an oddly chilling smile, with eyes like slivers of ice, and lips almost serpentine.
“So here you are,” she told me.
***
The house was even bigger inside than out. I was given a grand candlelight tour, from the darkest corners of its bowels to the tiniest cobwebs of its lofts. The place looked haunted enough, a fact I pointed out to her more than once as we walked.
“Have a look here,” she said, as we entered a large room above the main floor.
“What is it?”
“A chalkboard. Look.”
She raised her lantern. There was indeed a chalkboard set into the wall, and I suddenly remembered reading about it at the town’s public library a long time ago.
“This house used to be a seminary for girls, right?”
“In the early 1830s, yes, not long after the house was built. The first two floors were for classrooms and there are rooms upstairs where the students slept. Would you like to see them?”
She led me up a flight of steps hidden behind some old clothes at the back of a walk-in closet. The passage was like a step-ladder, narrow and very steep. A candle, flickering on a broken stool, greeted us at the top. On the right leaned a stack of old magazines. On the left, the flywheel from an antique loom.
We were at a kind of T intersection. Small wooden doors led into old bedrooms where once, long ago, teenaged girls had spent the night. Veronica showed me the left one first. Wind beat against the windows with powerful hands. Tree limbs scratched at the walls. We were walking to the other room when suddenly a voice (to this day I am sure it was the playful voice of a young girl, though all the ones I was later fortunate enough to get on tape sound deeper and much more forbidding), shouted: HEY!
Veronica quite nearly dropped her lantern. The voice had come from the top of the stairs, where nothing stirred now.
“Do you really like living here alone?” I asked, after some seconds had gone by.
“Why don’t I just finish showing you these rooms and then we’ll go downstairs?”
“Good idea.”
Ten minutes later we were back on the main floor.
“That’s everything,” Veronica told me.
“You’ve got yourself quite a place here,” I allowed. “In fact when I was a kid I wanted to own it myself. I loved it.”
“Is this the first time you’ve ever been inside?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
I smiled at her. “And now I love it even more.”
We looked at each other for some moments without saying anything.
“I’m glad you called me, Vee,” I came out with at last. “I’m glad I’m here.”
“Me too. Feel like taking a walk?”
“A walk? In this weather?”
“Sure,” she shrugged. “There’s just the wind—it won’t rain for hours yet. Her body came closer, the gown gliding. “Well?”
Well indeed. What choice did I have?
“Let’s go,” I told her.
***
So we took a walk. The wind, albeit powerful, was warm and playful. Indeed, a surprising number of people had ventured out that night to experience its magic. I remember couples ambling beneath the sidling trees, lanterns glowing. Some carried portable radios to keep tabs on the storm. In one neighborhood we came across a group of children playing with a puppy. They too had a radio on, and I asked one of the boys if there was any fresh news about the storm.
“Nope,” I was told, “same old stuff. Dawn sometime.”
We walked on, listening to the surf as it crashed against the rocky cliff faces of Reeding sound half a mile off. Its high waves were a lot like the memories I found myself coping with. Places I hadn’t seen in over ten years were set before me again, blown from the yellowed photographs of some fractured album in the dust. There was the Gilger Theater—or I should say, the parking lot where it once stood. Veronica told me about the fire; we were both sad to see it gone. Other memories were still around to be seen, such as the Port Street bridge, which we walked across, and Dick’s Camera shop. Old Dick Jarvis, Veronica said, was in his eighties these days and still ran the place.
An hour went by with the two of us talking idly about nothing at all. We passed a beach near Bull Bay and watched the waves, then made our way to nearby Peddler’s Alley. There were many shops here, all closed for the storm, where wind-chimes made fretful music above marble doorsteps.
By midnight we were back at the house, and I was at a window on the main floor, fiddling with the battery pack of a surveillance camera. I wanted to get it mounted in the attic as soon as possible, where we’d been given our little scare.
“So what’s it like living in New York?” Veronica wanted to know.
“I like it,” I answered. “Isn’t that funny?”
“Funny why?”
“All I hear is how people want out of that city for good. They tell me it’s a total damned mystery. But I guess that’s what I like about it.”
“Back in high school I had you pegged for doing something unusual when you graduated.”
I looked from the camera to find her simpering. “Really?”
“Really. Everyone did.”
“Stop it.” I went back to the battery pack, then looked at her again. “Everyone?”
“You were so tense and reserved, like you were trying to defuse a bomb no one else could see. Now look at you,” she said, coming closer. “You’re loose, you’re relaxed. Things turned out all right, didn’t they?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. But what makes you think because I was tense and reserved I was afraid of the future?”
“We were all afraid, Jack. Kids in high school, they never know what’s waiting outside. All they know about are the cracks.”
“Cracks?”
“That they’re wide, that there are lots of them—“ she hesitated, standing at one of the windows, the snaky arms of so many shadows entwining her features—“and that people slip through them. All the time.”
Her voice was but a whisper, like the inkling from whatever begged it beyond the glass. I rose and went to her.
“What happened after I left?”
“I was the one who left.”
“We both did. But I’ve sometimes wondered why.”
“It was too odd. We never shared a single secret together.”
“And now?”
Still eyeing the glass, Veronica took my hand. But her response betrayed the reaction. “I don’t suppose anything has changed.”
“Maybe not. Maybe it doesn’t matter.”
“Of course it matters, Jack.” Her eyes dropped. “I just wish I’d known years ago. We could have done so much for each other.”
“There’s still time.”
“No,” she replied.
Her grip on my hand tightened. Her face turned to mine—
And the kiss I had been waiting thirteen years to offer was suddenly there for the giving. We made it last, without awkwardness, without ambiguity. She was the seamstress of my past, the governess of my future; she was the lanterns, the candles, the hurricane over the sea. I lifted her in my arms. This was the end of our vagrancy, the end of our chamomile reticence. And later, in sleep, a dream I had interpreted the sound of the storm to be that of chains breaking. The spikes atop some high iron gate were bent and twisted into nonsense, and the bars were melting. Yet what existed beyond could not be deciphered. There was only the wind and rain—slate-gray, slanting rain. An urge to challenge this tempest begged, but dream or no, I didn’t quite dare. I waited instead, and when the truth of things came sweeping down, it was far too to vast absorb, unwilling to accept what it revealed.
***
Morning.
I was awakened by the crash of something. Glass. The storm had come and was all but ravaging the house off its foundation.
I stepped out of bed, gathering my clothes, and called Veronica’s name. There was no answer. Moments later there came the sound of feet in the hallway. I glanced at the door, thinking she would be there, but the open threshold was empty. Faint light spilled through, causing me to notice for the first time how dark the room was. And no wonder—the window that faced a row of trees next to the driveway had been boarded over. Thick, heavy ply-wood clung to the wall.
“’Vee?” I called again, this time from the hall. It was deserted and dark. In the adjacent rooms I discovered more evidence of what the night had done to the bedroom. Crude handiwork. Boards nailed over windows, sheets blanketing furniture (what little furniture there was; a lot seemed to have disappeared), moth-eaten and dusty. “Veronica?” I called for a third time, my strength diminished.
Something heavy came down on the ceiling, shaking the entire house. Three seconds later it came again. I swallowed. She was in the attic.
The door at the back of the closet was hard to find, though I knew right where it was. How indeed could anyone forget such an oddity? And yet the darkness made it difficult, and I found myself wishing for a lighter ever since giving up smoking two years previous. Once inside the closet I groped; my arm probed open space. The door was already open. Gaping, in fact. It had been taken off its hinges at some point during the night. The stairs beyond led into blackness.
I was about to call her name again when I heard her walk to the highest step. After a brief pause, she started down. I could only see the bottom three steps, and again wished for some tool to disarm the shadows. The storm ripped and raged. At times it was like tree trunks were being slammed against the walls. But as Veronica neared the bottom I heard nothing but the agony of the risers—and at that point knew, beyond doubt, that Veronica was not the person descending the passage.
There was one last creak (which came from the very bottom, I was sure), then—nothing. After all of that, nothing. I wasn’t sure what had happened, but waited for another five minutes in front of the closet door, chilled yet unwilling to dismiss the event.
I went back downstairs in a mixture of puzzlement and relief. I have since returned to the attic several times. It’s charged place, cold and austere. And that little girl is still there, which is sad. Still there, but not alone.
***
The storm forced me to wait until it was safe to leave the house. Where Veronica had disappeared to, under such conditions, I could not say; I could only hope for her fortune, and my parents’ fortune, whom I had all but forgotten of during the night.
It was after two in the afternoon before I managed to see them. Justinville looked like a cobweb torn apart by a broom. People were standing in the rain. Some looked speechlessly at their homes, or what was left of their homes. Others sobbed, their faces hidden beneath fingers that clawed and trembled.
My dad was in the front yard when I got to the house, looking at where the roof used to be.
“Christ, boy,” he said when he saw me—not Jack, are you all right? Where’ve you been? or It’s been a long time, son. “Christ, boy, lookit my house.”
I could say nothing. This smashed jigsaw puzzle was the house I’d grown up in, the place of my youth.
“Where’s Mom?” I managed.
He pointed upward. “There’s your old bedroom, son.”
I looked. There it was, all right, except it looked more like a county landfill now, all trash and forgotten trinkets bared to the gray drizzle.
“Your mother’s out back,” Dad went on, “cleanin’ up a little.”
I found her standing amongst the shattered remains of I don’t know what. A mattress lay in the middle of the yard. A lamp. Part of a desk. The sink from the kitchen in which I’d once had my mouth washed out with soap. The storm was worse than anyone had expected. For that first hour or two I even forgot about Veronica, too engrossed with comforting my mother and helping wherever I could.
Three days later the truth came again, this time for keeps. By then my head was clearing up a little and had begun to muse over Veronica’s whereabouts, mostly while I was alone. That was how it was in the basement, where Mom and Dad had stayed during the storm; I was holding a broom in one hand and a Lucky in the other, trying to remember the way she’d looked on the night I stayed at her house. It was hard. I kept trying to fill the void in her eyes with something sedulous that struggled for freedom from another time.
Then I noticed a torn photograph fluttering on the edge of an old bedside table. What it showed made me wonder whether I was dreaming. It was Veronica.
The newspaper had been drenched at some point or other, and had dried to a yellowish-brown that made the pages feel brittle and aged. A flashlight lay nearby; I shined it over the parchment, and began to feel cold.
The photograph was small. I was looking at an obituary column.
“Son?”
It was Dad, calling from upstairs. I couldn’t answer him. A harsh ringing sound, the kind that warns of blackness and falling, had encapsulated the world.
“Jack? Are you down there?”
“Yes,” I croaked.
Then I fell down, bringing the entire table with me. It was a rickety old thing just waiting for an excuse to collapse, and the crash was more than enough to bring my father running. He got into the room just as Veronica’s picture floated to the floor.
The date of the obit was last spring, in April. She’d been dead for over three months.
***
A full year has passed since the day of the storm, with me floundering after daydreams and unavailing insights. Thus far, my pockets are empty. There is no comprehending that night—or, for that matter, the house itself. I have since spent the night there a number of times, and to my knowledge there are at least five entities occupying the premises. Three of them, including the lass, seem harmless enough, but the other two can be quite taxing on the nerves. I awoke early one morning last month to discover a tall, powerful-looking old woman dressed in black glaring at me with hate on her features and a knife in her hand, only to watch her disappear as I cowered in terror.
The obituary indicates that Veronica was indeed living in the house at the time of her death, caused by a car/truck accident just east of Bull Bay. She’d been decapitated, I later learned, by a telephone wire.
For answers, I’ve searched everywhere. The house has yet to yield a clue, but I’m going back next week, this time to stay. There’s something there, I think—something besides harsh laughter and angry old women with knives. It may be the same something that belongs in the whisper of Veronica’s voice.
Aside from the house I’ve been searching a few other places. There are relatives, of course, and friends. Old high school photographs. Her headstone at Tate Street Cemetery. I’ve even attempted to contact her by Ouija board, and there was one occasion in the infamous attic when I think we may have been communicating. Except all she would keep saying was: O-N-E-T-H-I-N-G-T-O-O-M-A-N-Y-P-O-L-E-S.
It’s summertime here in New York. The sun is shining, and my office window is open to let in the breeze, which carries with it a light scent of caramel from a vendor on the street. I like it fine, and I think I’ll be able to remember it well enough to take with me when I leave, on down to Charleston, and then to Justinville.
Flights back and forth are done in first class of late. It’s the house. It hasn’t yielded any clues, but from among its corridors I’ve captured some of the most outstanding formations ever seen on film. I’ve recorded voices and written articles. My picture has shown up in magazines like Omni and Discover.
Still, I miss Veronica. That’s okay. Maybe she misses me too. If so I imagine that, one day, we’ll see each other again. In a garden, perhaps, or near church-bells after a rain, on a night warm and rife with breezes that carry foliage high over the tolling spires of our dreams.
For now I go alone. But there is a truth behind all this, a truth that maybe—just maybe—could be different from the ones I see in the everyday world. A truth that stands in the light and flourishes. A truth that sings forth, and clears the skies, and spends eternity with me in a house that feels like home.