A moment of silence behind my closed eyelids in the dark. It had seemed like the best idea at the time, because none of us could inhabit the space with his things anymore. Maybe it was wrong, but even now, I wasn’t sure of that. Looking at Ben’s pillow or his soft, well-worn pajamas today would kill me.
When the unimaginable happens, you make the best decisions you can, and you never know if they were the right ones.
Charlotte spoke again. “So it isn’t the space that draws him but the toys. He followed his belongings up here. When you took the crayons downstairs, he followed them and used them. He loved these things, and he loves them still. You were right not to get rid of them. He didn’t want you to.”
Jesus, this was hard. I kept my eyes closed, kept breathing through the sharp pain in my chest. I stroked the soft head of the teddy bear, feeling the fur against my palm. “Some of these things were ours first,” I said. “We handed them down. The bear I’m holding was Dodie’s, and she passed it to Ben. Other things, we bought for him.”
“These toys were his life,” Charlotte said softly. “His favorite things. Where they go, he goes.”
My throat choked closed. When I could speak again, I said, “What are you getting at?”
“Your revenant is a little boy,” she replied. “He has always been a little boy. That’s why the toys are so central to what’s happening. He has never been a man.”
I opened my eyes and looked at her. “What do you mean?”
Charlotte was putting her instruments back into her briefcase. Her businesslike motions calmed me a little. “When did your parents buy this house?” she asked. “Or is it an ancestral home?”
I shook my head. “They moved here after they married and before Violet was born.” I did the math in my head. “Around 1954. Why?”
“I’d like to go downstairs, please. I’m finished here. I’d like to see the bedrooms, since the manifestation appeared there as well.”
“Charlotte.”
Her look was all cool English imperiousness. “Vail. You called me all the way here. Do you want my assistance, or don’t you?”
I bit back my retort and stood.
“Which bedroom do you want to see?” I asked when we had descended the attic stairs.
“Dodie’s, since your brother appeared to her there.”
I had been trained from childhood not to enter my sisters’ bedrooms or face immediate execution, so I opened Dodie’s door for Charlotte and stood back. “Be my guest.” I didn’t hear either sister in the kitchen downstairs. I wondered where they had gone.
Charlotte took out her spectrometer and went into Dodie’s room. We went down the hall like that—Dodie’s room, then our parents’ abandoned bedroom, then Violet’s room. Ben’s empty bedroom. Charlotte used the spectrometer in each room but didn’t take any more photos, even in Ben’s room. She also didn’t take notes.
When we got to my room, I leaned against the doorframe and watched her. Charlotte took silent note of my VUFOS file boxes, the few clothes in the open closet, the slanted ceiling, the messy twin bed. If she had any comment about being in my bedroom, she didn’t say it aloud.
Instead, she turned a dial on her spectrometer and rotated in a slow circle, staring at the output screen.
“Does that thing actually tell you anything?” I asked her, unable to bear the silence any longer.
“A little,” she said without looking up.
“I always wondered if it was just a prop.”
“It isn’t a prop,” she replied icily. “It measures electromagnetic waves.”
“And?” I didn’t want to admit I was curious, but I couldn’t help it.
“There are peaks and valleys on this floor,” Charlotte said. “The readings are all over the place. Very low in the master bedroom, and high in your sisters’ bedrooms. It’s rather unusual. I haven’t seen readings quite like this since a case I worked in Vermont—an abandoned girls’ boarding school. I don’t know what haunted that place, and honestly, I hope never to know. I was happy to get out of there as soon as I could.”
I crossed my arms. “So my house is haunted.”
“You already knew that,” was the irritated reply. “Have you seen any manifestations in this room?”
I scratched an eyebrow with one finger, letting my gaze drift to the wall. “I saw lights over my bed when I was a kid. Figures standing over me. The words ‘wake up.’ It hasn’t happened since I’ve been back.”
“The same words written on the wall downstairs.”
