Chapter 11
The next morning, Elizabeth's most pressing aggravation was not related to real estate, but to the proper accessories for the ensemble she planned to wear. She knew that at one time she had had a wide black leather belt, but she could not remember packing it, much less unpacking it. After a fruitless detour through the dresser and the pockets of her suitcase, she stomped off down the hallway to borrow one from her sister.
She found Alice in her usual pose, snuggled into bed with her laptop. Elizabeth was surprised to find her sister alone. She had not heard Officer Joe leave the previous night, and she assumed that he would still be around. Instead, Alice was as solitary as a nun and the only sign of recent male habitation in her room was a large gray sock draped across the back of a frilly mahogany chair. Joe was marking his territory.
"Can I borrow a belt?" Elizabeth asked.
Alice did not look up from her computer, but waved an agreeable hand around the room. "Go right ahead. They're in the top drawer of the bureau, and there might be some on the closet floor."
Elizabeth pulled open the bureau drawer and plunged her hands into a tangle of belts: some in the form of gold and silver chains, and others in leather of a dazzling array of colors. Oddly enough, none was black. Elizabeth expanded her search to the closet, where she found brown leather belts and, ah, black as well, but too narrow and alligator.
Elizabeth rose and brushed the dust kitties from her knees. As she bent forward to pick off a stubborn knot of cat hair that had entangled itself in the fibers of her skirt, a dark form under the gilt chair caught her eye. At first she thought it was Joe's other sock, but on closer inspection revealed it to be a different man's sock (a different sock, not necessarily a different man), sprawling across a purse, which she found to be a clutch. What she had mistaken for the handle was her very own black belt.
"How did this get here?" Elizabeth demanded, turning to face her sister with the belt dangling from her thumb and forefinger.
Alice looked up and blinked. "Oh, that? I borrowed it. You can have it back."
"Gosh, thanks. My very own belt?" Elizabeth's sarcastic tone did not register with Alice, who had returned to her typing. "Are you blogging again?"
Alice said, "Yes, I want to describe everything that happened last night before I forget. The ritual went great and we got to meet our very own house ghost. How often does that kind of thing happen? I've just got to share with my loyal readers."
"With who? How do you know people actually read it?" Elizabeth asked.
"Because they comment and e-mail me," Alice said very slowly and clearly as if she were talking to an idiot. "And they talk about what I wrote, so I know that they read it."
"So you actually get hits?"
"Sure, I don't have a hit counter or anything, but people are obviously reading it."
"Oh." Elizabeth's brain finally ground into action. "So you're about to publish all the details of what we did to protect the house on-line for anyone see, including Marla and her coven."
"Yes, but," Alice began, then stopped. "I didn't think of that."
"Isn't there some way to tell where your hits are coming from?" Elizabeth sat on the edge of the bed.
"Well, there is, but I never bothered to install the tools." Alice's fingers rested quietly over the keyboard. A moment later she shrugged and flipped her hair over her shoulders. "It's not like Marla could do anything with this information anyway," she said.
"You could post something misleading to throw them off," Elizabeth was suggesting, as Dirk wafted into the room and interrupted her.
He was carrying an armload of wood. "Do you girls want to have fires tonight? It's really cold outside and it's going to freeze. If you help carry in the wood, I'll build them for you."
"Excellent!" Alice looked at her cold grate. "Joe's coming over tonight. It'll be so romantic."
Dirk agreed. "But you'd better get all that flammable stuff away from your fireplace." He jerked his chin towards the crinoline heaped on the hearthrug before trooping into his room to drop his load on his own hearth.
Elizabeth considered her own fireplace, which she could enjoy all by herself, unless Penrose chose to wander in and offset the heat with his own chill. She decided that she would rather like a fire, all the better to enjoy a good book with.
She buckled her belt around her waist and went for the wood. Downstairs, she paused in the dining room to plump up the pentagrams which were so pale she could barely discern them against the light filtering in from the outside.
She stood before the windows, her index finger extended into the second pentagram, and listened carefully until its vibrations steadied and increased in amplitude. She considered what a picture she must make, standing there pointing out the window at nothing, as that is how it would appear to anyone who could not see the pentagrams, say, her housemates. Folks who saw her from outside would think she was pointing at them.
While the pentagram brightened, she looked past it out the window and found that she had an excellent view into Trip's apartment. In fact, she was pointing at his television, which was on and showed nothing more torrid than the morning news.
A voluptuous woman wandered into Trip's living room and passed in front of the television. Her face hidden in the glare of a reflection on the window, she wore a shimmering green gown, on the formal side for eight in the morning, and waved her arms around. She appeared to be casting glitter into the air. Elizabeth dropped her hand, by now the pentagram was bright enough to be visible to anyone even without special sight, and stepped back from the window so that the woman would not catch sight of her.
A low chuckle rumbled up behind her and vibrated beneath her sternum. She spun around and saw nothing but her own shadow falling across the ping pong table. The early morning sunlight flung itself in pale bars across the rug. The only movement was Rififi daintily washing his whiskers in the doorway to the hall.
The laughter rang out again, skidding rapidly up a few octaves to a hysterical falsetto.
She ran from the dining room back to the kitchen, slamming the door behind her. Heart pounding, she placed her hands flat on the kitchen table and leaned on it to take some weight off her suddenly liquefied knees. It occurred to her that the dining room was located above the sand room and that if it weren't for the need to perk up the rapidly fading pentagrams, she would never set foot in there again.
Penrose appeared in the kitchen, looking at an open black folio in his hands. He set it on the table before her and pointed to a woodcut of a man sleeping in a tree and a pictorial border of seven runes entwined with serpents. "See this? I think I may have found a lead. Can you tell me if you've noticed any patterns in the ballads you went through? Especially anything involving numbers. Except for three, of course. There's no getting away from three." He looked up and noted her distress. "What's wrong?"
She raised a trembling hand and pointed at the dining room door. "It's back. That thing from Halloween."
"What?" Astonished, he strode to the door and threw it open.
Elizabeth joined him in the doorway. The dining room was completely still, even Rififi had wandered away. The pentagrams hung brightly in the windows and the Velvis hung in shadow. A whiff of sulfur twisted past her nose.
"There's nothing here," he said.
"Nothing you can see, but there is something." She voiced a reasonable suspicion. "Was it you, playing some kind of joke?"
"No!" Earnest, he reached out for her, caught himself, and gripped the doorjamb above her shoulder instead. "I would never do that to you."
She quailed under the vehemence of his electric gaze and stared at the floor. "You played tricks on the coven," she said, sounding disbelieving and resentful to her own ears.
"I didn't scare them. That was just light, nothing that would even interfere with the efficacy of their spell. Such as it was." He released the doorjamb and returned his attention to the dining room. "It should have got rid of any of your average manifestations. Did you ward every room?"
"All but the sand room. We couldn't get the door open, so we warded the door."
Penrose rubbed his chin. "That wouldn't be enough. You'd need to ward the floor over the sinkhole too. Even then, the spell might not be strong enough to banish this, if it's what I think it is." His voice trailed off.
"What do you think it is?"
"I don't want to say. I'll do some more research today. Maybe it's not as bad as it seems." He smiled reassuringly. "Try to stay out of the dining room in the meantime."
Elizabeth was not reassured. In fact, she was beginning to regard Penrose's reassurances as a signal to start packing.
Penrose took his folio from the kitchen table and headed back to the library, avoiding the dining room and taking the route through the hallway.
"There's still a sulfur smell," she called after him. "It's getting worse. And it'll take more than moonlight and mercury to get rid of it."
His voice floated back down the hallway. "Don't worry. I'll take care of it."
Elizabeth banged her head lightly against the doorjamb a few times. She decided that some fresh air was in order, for herself and the house. After cracking open the kitchen windows, she shrugged into a long, battered overcoat from the hook beside the back door and pulled on the pair of men's work gloves she found in the pocket.
She stepped out onto the back porch. The sky arched high into a dome of brilliant clarity and the air was so cold enough to burn her lungs. She took several deep breaths to cleanse away any ghostly miasma that might still be affecting her mind and then hurried out to the woodpile, located inconveniently far from the house back by the gate to the alley.
The hard soles of her dress shoes tilted under her feet when she stepped on the broad gaps between the bricks in the path that led her to the carriage house. The door of the carriage house, the human-sized door and not the carriage door, was banging in a stiff breeze that rattled the leaves along the path before her. The leaves nearly covered the grass now.
She took a quick peek inside the carriage house and found the contents undisturbed. The dusty, black closed carriage rested serenely amid concentric rings of antique lawnmowers encrusted with a black paste of rancid oil and rotted clippings. The only mower that still looked usable was a push reel mower of the oldest vintage. So much for mechanization. She shut the door firmly behind her and made sure that the gate to the back alley was locked and secured.
The alley, however, was occupied. A large white SUV was parked behind Trip's house with the engine running. Elizabeth looked at the license plate, but it meant nothing to her.
She pulled back one end of the tarp which covered the woodpile and picked up a few logs. The woodpile rested on a long wooden frame which kept the logs a few inches off the ground. At the far end of the frame, she saw that four huge granite blocks had been sunk deep into the ground. Smack in the center was a wooden cover with an ancient iron lock threaded through an iron loop protruding from the crack between the stones.
"A well?" she murmured to herself. She walked onto the stones and tapped the cover with one toe. It rang hollow. The wood planks of the cover were unpainted and weathered uniformly gray, but were so thick and densely grained that they showed no signs of deterioration beyond the silvering of the surface. A few wood chips rested beside it though and she leaned closer to look.
On one edge of the cover, some deep scores revealed the bright wood that lay beneath the weathered surface. It looked like someone had recently been prying at it with a crowbar.
She could not imagine that anyone would want to get into the well to get at the water, which was not likely to be potable anyway. A few thoughts of the wells used as plot devices in various horror stories popped unbidden to her mind. She ran back to the house and up the stairs to her room where she threw the wood onto the hearth. It was not enough to make a good fire, but she decided that she would not be going out to the woodpile again without someone to help her throw some wards on the well. And she knew she was scaring herself over nothing. Really.
The drive to work did nothing to improve her mood.
Alice did her usual thing, popping out of bed in complete disarray, but in five minutes flat throwing together a spectacular outfit and hairdo that would be the pride of any salon in town, and being ready to walk out the door while Elizabeth was still gulping down her last mug of coffee. They took Alice's car since the heat worked reliably, and Alice varied the route, to liven up the commute a bit, she said. Today's route was what Alice called the stations of the cross, that took them past a half-dozen churches.
The churches all had signboards out front, giving the times for worship services and Sunday schools, in addition to inspirational messages or messages that were meant to be so. Some of the message boards had flashing LEDs scrolling through biblical verses. One such high-tech church had its sign set to flash on the question, "Ready for the next world?"
The next world, where Penrose's body is, she thought to herself. Miss Price's words at the banishment ritual haunted her. A few days ago she would have laughed at the message board, but now, with Penrose himself as evidence, she had to entertain the idea of other worlds as concrete as this one. And other questions were begged: Was the next world a parallel universe? One of many? What about the ether?
Although she had never been able to wrap her brain around the arguments for parallel universes and so she couldn't have a really informed opinion about them, Elizabeth had understood the concept of the ether as universal medium when it had been covered in her physics class. In fact, the ether had been thoroughly disproved decades ago, if not before. On the other hand, Penrose's disruption of the computers was clearly action at a distance, the impulse for which must have been carried by some medium. And why couldn't everyone see him and the pentagrams? If she wasn't seeing light bouncing off his form, then what was it? Elizabeth didn't like to think that she had anything on her retinas but rods and cones, like everyone else. She squinted out at the road, the signs blurring before her eyes. She crossed her eyes.