Helen
SEPTEMBER 9, 2015
“Are you sure about this?” Helen asked as she followed Riley through the door of the old Hartsboro Hotel. Everything about this felt strange and slightly dangerous. There was no way the old Connecticut Helen would have let anyone drag her to a creepy run-down hotel to sit with a bunch of strangers and try to make contact with the spirit world. It seemed like the opening of a bad horror movie.
The sign in the front said that it was an antique shop now. They stopped in the lobby, beside the old front desk, like they were waiting to check in, waiting for someone to pass them one of the old keys that still hung on hooks on the wall.
“Like I said, it can’t hurt, right?” Riley told her, voice low. “Dicky hosts these spirit circles every Wednesday, and they’re open to whoever comes by. Maybe if Hattie or Jane or Ann has a message, they’ll be able to get it to you through the circle.”
Helen was hesitant. She was still struggling to figure out the logic of all of this, because it seemed likeifsomething was going to happen, wouldn’t it happen back at the house? The house and the objects in it were what drew them back. How was coming to some dusty old hotel five miles away from the bog, where you had to pay twenty bucks to sit around in a candlelit circle with strangers, going to help? But still, she was desperate to make contact again. Since she’d seen Ann’s spirit for that brief moment a few weeks ago, there had been nothing.
Riley seemed determined to give this approach a try, and Helen had to admit she was curious about the spirit circle: what it would be like, who might be there. What sort of people were desperate enough to talk to the dead that they’d come to something like this?
Me,she thought.I’m their target audience.
“Have you been before?” Helen asked Riley.
“Once or twice, but it was forever ago,” Riley said. “You just have to promise you won’t tell Olive we did this. She’ll think we’ve both totally lost it, and right now I think you and I are pretty much the only stable things she’s got in her life.”
“And you have to promise not to ever tell Nate,” Helen said.
“It’s our secret then,” Riley said.
Riley had handled Nate, telling him that she was whisking Helen away for a girls’ night out. “Come on, all work and no play makes Helen a dull girl. I’ll take good care of her,” Riley had said. “I promise.”
The three of them had spent the day installing the hardwood floor in the living room. It was salvaged maple, and Helen was thrilled with it: each scratch and nail hole gave it character—a warm charm that new flooring could never achieve. Even Nate agreed that the extra work to get the old boards fitting together and flush was worth it. And Riley had gotten them a great price on it. Riley had also found them a few hundred square feet of wide pine boards from an old silo that they were going to use for the upstairs floors. Nate was thrilled that they were now under budget on flooring.
Now Helen followed Riley up the hotel stairs (which didn’t feel all too sturdy) and down a carpeted hallway. They passed doors to old hotel rooms, most closed, but the open ones were packed full of junk: broken furniture, racks of moth-eaten clothing, rusting bedsprings.
At the end of the hall was a set of double doors. Above them, an old sign read:BAR AND LOUNGE.
Riley went through, Helen behind her.
The room was dark and smelled of scented candles, musty incense, and maybe marijuana. There was a long wooden bar just in front of them with a mirror behind it and a row of empty stools in front. To their right, a wall of windows that had been covered with heavy curtains. To their left, a group of people sat in a circle, candles burning all around them: on the floor, on the mantel of the fireplace they sat in front of, on tables and empty chairs. They were talking in low voices. Riley led Helen over. The floor was covered with a tattered throw rug. The furniture was beat-up, the upholstery full of holes. There were six people in the circle, and now all twelve eyes were on Riley and Helen.
“Hi, Dicky,” Riley said.
“Nice to see you, Riley,” he said.
“This is my friend Helen.”
The man she spoke to nodded, looked up at Helen, eyes locked on hers. The skin on the back of her neck prickled.
“Welcome,” he said. “Take a seat.” He was tall, Helen guessed in his early fifties, and had an angular, weathered face with small gray-blue eyes and a large mustache. He was wearing jeans, a button-down shirt, cowboy boots with pointed toes. Then Helen noticed his large leather belt and the holster attached to it. The man had a handgun strapped to his waist.
What did a man who talked to ghosts need with a gun?
She thought the best idea was to take Riley’s hand and drag her the hell out of there. But it was too late. Riley had taken an empty seat and was pointing at the last vacant chair, letting Helen know she should take it.
They’d been waiting with two empty chairs. Like they’d been expecting them.
Helen settled in, looked over at Dicky and tried to imagine him as the little boy who had lost his father to the woods, to the white deer. What had little Dicky seen that day? How long had he chased after his father and the deer, calling out, desperate?
The woman to Dicky’s left leaned over and whispered something to the old man next to her. He had large eyes and ears with tufts of hair growing out of them. Helen thought he looked like a great horned owl. The owl man nodded.
“Before we begin,” Dicky said, “let’s all take a minute to remember that the communication we all seek with those who have passed doesn’t begin and end here, in this circle.”
The owl man nodded, gave a low “Mm-hmm.”
