Help for the Haunted
by John Searles
Chapter 1
What Makes You Afraid?
Whenever the phone rang late at night, I lay in my narrow bed and listened.
My mother picked up on the first ring so as not to wake my sister, if she was home, or me. In hushed tones, she soothed the caller before handing the phone to my father. His voice was stiffer, more formal, as he made plans to meet somewhere or offered directions to our faded and drooping Tudor on a dead-end lane in the tiny town of Dundalk, Maryland. There were times when the person on the other end of the line had called from a pay phone as nearby as Baltimore. A priest, I guessed, had scratched our number on a scrap of paper and handed it over. Or maybe it had been found by simply searching the tissuey pages of the phonebook, since we were listed, same as any ordinary family, even if ordinary was the last thing we were.
Not long after my father put down the receiver, I heard them dressing. My parents were like characters on an old TV show whose outfits stayed the same every episode. My mother—tall, thin, abnormally pale—wore some version of a curveless gray dress with pearly buttons down the front whenever she was dealing with the public. Her dark hair, threaded with white, was always pinned up. Tiny crucifixes glimmered in her ears, around her neck too. My father wore suits in somber shades of brown, a cross nestled in his chest hairs beneath his yellow button-down, black hair combed away from his face so that the first thing you noticed was his smudged, wire-rimmed glasses.
Once dressed, they brushed past my door and down the stairs to wait in the kitchen with its peeling blue wallpaper, sipping tea at the table, until headlights from a car turning into our dirt driveway splashed against my bedroom ceiling. Next I heard murmurs, impossible to decipher from my room above, though I had my ideas about what was being said. Finally, I listened to the clomp clomp clomp of footsteps as my parents led their visitor or visitors into the basement and everyone grew quiet below.
That’s how things went until a snowy night in February of 1989.
When the phone rang after midnight that evening, I opened my eyes and listened, same as always. Never once, not one single time, did I claim to experience the sort of “feelings” my mother had, and yet something sawed at my insides, giving me the sense that this call was different from those that had come before.
“It’s her,” my mother told my father instead of passing him the phone.
“Thank God. Is she okay?”
“She is. But she says she’s not coming back.”
Three days. That’s how long Rose—my older sister, who shared my mother’s name but none of her gentle temperament—had been gone. This time, all the shrieking and plate breaking and door slamming had been about her hair, I guessed, or lack thereof, since she had hacked it off again. Or maybe a boy, since I knew from snatches of overheard conversations that my parents did not approve of whomever Rose had been spending time with since her return from Saint Julia’s.
As I lay in my bed, listening to my mother act as a translator between my sister and my father, I stared at the textbooks on my desk. Eighth grade had become easy, just like sixth and seventh before it, and I couldn’t wait for the challenge of Dundalk High School next fall. The shelf above was lined with hand-carved mahogany ponies. In the glow of the nightlight, their long, wild faces, complete with flared nostrils and bared teeth, appeared alive.
“If we want to talk,” I heard my mother tell my father across the hall, “she says we can meet her at the church in town.”
“The church in town?” The more agitated he became, the deeper and louder his voice. “Did the girl happen to notice the blizzard outside?”
Moments later, my mother stepped into my room, leaned over my bed, and gently shook my shoulder. “Wake up, sweetheart. We’re going to meet your sister, and we don’t want to leave you here alone.” I opened my eyes slowly and, even though I knew full well, asked in a groggy voice what was going on. I liked playing the part of the daughter my parents wanted. “You can keep your pajamas on,” my mother said in her whispery voice. “But it’s cold out, so slip your coat over them. And you’ll need your boots. A hat and mittens too.”