As an afternoon was allowed for his decision, things were decided when the check was deposited in the Waverly Bean bank. This in-town visit also provided an opportunity to conduct research at the county courthouse records office, where the researcher was right in thinking Tazewell Manor was a subject of local lore.
The county clerk seemed startled by the prospect of a visitor, yet directed Liam down a dully lit narrow corridor. He found a small overheated office, and an archivist. The obese woman sported a torrid of short-cropped black hair, which looked like birds had squabbled in it. Her dimpled arms were covered in macabre tattoos. His greeting drew her round with effort to face him. Once he explained the object of his visit, she gave an ejaculation equal to her appearance. “Why would you be summoned there? That place is haunted.”
The visitor was generally agnostic on these subjects, so persisted in his inquiry. “What can you give me by way of factual information?”
The chair-bound woman removed a small contraption from her desk drawer and waved it about in a bit of theatre. “This is an electronic voice phenomena recorder for the dead to communicate,” she properly informed. “I conducted a paranormal investigation at Tazewell Manor. Listen to this.”
The woman’s magniloquent voice was first heard. “Are you at unrest? Are you trapped here?”
Static answered her interrogation.
“Did you hear that?” she crackled. “A cry?”
With this notion planted in his head, the portion of tape was replayed. The association on second hearing was unavoidable. The garbled utterance, which could not be made out in part or whole, was judged to have a tragic timbre.
Liam pressed an objection. “Doesn’t the poor grade of your recording apparatus encourages a liberal interpretation of hisses?”
The woman acknowledged this criticism guardedly. Her defense was less rhapsodic than technical. “Spirit energy lives in the white noise.”
“I have no doubt tea leaves in the bottom of a cup are more aesthetically interesting than a tea bag,” responded the skeptic, “since the intelligence-seeking mind has more to work with.”
A ready rebuttal was supplied. “My evidence is not conveniently arranged, or extracted too enthusiastically from creaking floorboards and drafty hallways.”
“Why should ghosts keep to the night, or old houses?” he observed. “Why should ghosts be attracted to atmospherics, if not for your benefit alone?”
“What you call ‘atmospherics’ is the evocation of primal emotion, which can attach itself to a place as readily as to intellectual facts. Feelings are indispensable to judgment. Where meaning is not persuaded by feeling, one cannot differentiate between bread and stones. Intellectually, The Grand Canyon is a hole in the ground; but is it our intellect that draws us to it?”
“Well,” he moderated in tone. “Perhaps it is neither emotion nor intellect that attracts one. Perhaps it is novelty.”
“Novelty…?” The woman hummed with incredulity. She pushed forward a bold inch and smiled. (This expression appeared to be uncommon to her since her facial muscles resisted the idea.)
Liam pressed his point. “Because emotion invents monsters as easily as angels, the emoter can deceive, or be deceived, where there was no supplication, or appeal, to better reason and its angels. Ann Radcliffe wrote, I believe, ‘When the mind has once begun to yield to the weakness of superstition, trifles impress it with the force of conviction.’”
The formality of the objection required an answer in kind. “Didn’t Henry David Thoreau say, ‘Men are probably nearer the central truth in their superstitions than in their science’?”
Liam suspected his antagonist had a quiver full of retorts whose purpose was to justify her profession.
Her lecture continued. “From the view of the furthest satellite, we may recognize weather patterns on other planets, but never suppose intelligent influence on these processes due to our insufficient scale of magnification. Similarly, if we shoot too far in the other direction, and go to the subatomic level, what is there in our new view to distinguish a finely crafted Quaker chair from the impersonal molecules of air that surround it?”
Liam quibbled, “It is possible that realms of microbes lie undiscovered in the crannies of bookshelves. I do not dispute it. Yet only a lazy intellect insists their sphere of influence extends to the ideas contained in books on the same shelves.”
“An intellect may indeed fall victim to laziness, but for lack of perspective,” she challenged. “Ideas and microbes do share causality, yet through chains of relation only God comprehends.”
Liam felt the conversation expanding to fill the entire morning. “Be that as it may,” he answered diplomatically (wishing to exit the topic). “What can you tell me about the house and its history?”
The woman put away her device reluctantly, and turned to a cabinet containing long narrow trays. She cosseted her archive of old newspapers like embroidered Victorian antimacassars laid between sheets of wax paper, and her sedulity placed her inescapably at his shoulder. He failed to bring his reading glasses, so was unable to read any of the fine print.
Sensing his difficulty, she explained, “Ellis Cummings Taylor was a renowned mind reader, and used his fortune to build a palatial house near the county line. The house was intended to be a showcase, yet the new resident’s mother passed shortly after its completion, and the complexion of the place changed.
Like that other great showman, Harry Houdini, Taylor was inconsolable over his mother’s death, and from that tragic day he pursued paranormal research, and attempted to communicate with the dead.” Here the storyteller paused to compose a frown and add color to the rest of her account. “The property became a solemn and secluded place before falling into disuse. Many falsely believe it was razed by wind years ago, but it is still stands.”
Liam processed this information no further than the mentioned occupation of mind reader. “What more do you know of this performer?”
The archivist continued, “His wife worked as an assistant in his act, and though he excelled at reading the thoughts of others, he failed with hers. They slept in separate rooms in the house, at his request, and invariably, though with little detection from the husband, her feelings grew estranged.
Where a thought could be spared for his matrimonial state, he bought a dog as a companion for his wife. A bell was added to the pet’s collar so its movements might be monitored and, by extension, those of the spouse also. The bell was to keep the wife dutifully in the husband’s thoughts where sentiment was less persuasive.
Unfortunately the dog was of a nervous nature and fled each time the significant other entered the room. This situation was given time in hopes a bond might be established; and it came one day when the husband entered the morning room to find the dog obediently at his wife’s feet.
It was in comprehending this new friendship that Taylor realized he had not of late heard the dog moving around the house, although the bell was still attached to its collar. Persons finishing exterior brickwork to his house came to him within the day with dire news. They found the dog dead on the property, killed by falling masonry. The receiver of this news went to the location and discovered a corpse that had been dead some days.
The relationship between spouse and dog was apparently reconciled when the latter, previously frightened by a specter, came to share her incorporeal state.”
(The apocryphal story ended here; and perhaps there was more a moral to be drawn from the dubious account than any scare: that of a husband so estranged in feeling that he could little differentiate between living and dead beings.)
While Liam composed these thoughts, the overhead fluorescent light sputtered in a postscript. He glanced at his storyteller. The imprint of a smile resumed the rough proportions of her previous smile, which, unsettlingly, had never entirely quit her face. It continued to hang there with the contorted features of a stroke victim.
He backed away reflexively, just as their sole source of light shorted out.
The woman seized on the unfolding drama to wheel herself forward. She was abruptly the foremost shadow in a room of shadows. Yet despite this concealment, her physical appearance continued to erode, with deep cracks migrating from her face to her decorated arms.
She darkly speculated, “Every ghost is bound to have a tale, even if it is only a reenacted fragment. And to require so little can only improve his repetitions by paring down his occupation to its essential aspects. We are perhaps ghosts before we realize it: already engaged in acts of haunting where we unwittingly crisscross our footsteps.”
Liam had grown uncomfortable with the exclusivity of his company. Seeking egress from crafted speeches, he announced, with as much insouciance as could be manufactured, “Thank you for your time,” and darted into the corridor.
He paused halfway to the lobby and glanced over his shoulder. The archivist worn a knee-length skirt, and in seeing her tattooed leg penetrated the corridor, he assumed her wheelchair would follow him out of the dark room. Instead, her lower half lingered in the doorway, as if a guillotine had severed it from upper half. A twitch started in the left leg before becoming a full-blown tremor in right. Both extremities wriggled violently before collapsing—like pole-less tents—in a spasm!
This was beyond the description of any nightmare, but in seeing both legs suddenly become ‘deboned’ and lifeless, Liam was compelled to return with aid.
The wheelchair now blocked entrance to the room. A Gothic tattoo was the only thing he recognized in the chair. The pound of flesh, on which this design was etched, conformed to no feature of natural anatomy: This was the padding of an elaborate body suit—and one hastily shed!
Liam made no call for its former inhabitant. Light from the corridor made no more progress than himself in getting past the wheelchair. He did not remember seeing any other door in the empty office that might serve as an exit.
Having ascertained an account of the house, its builder, and legends thereby connected, the shaken researcher left the premises.
Of greatest materiality to him was the similarity between the professions of Taylor and the painter’s morning intruder. Moreover, a third person could now be added to this list on conjurers. Sense told him to abandon this project immediately, but he was determined to make a careful inspection his gift horse.
Copyright © 2008-2022 Michael Teague. All rights reserved.