Spire in the Woods/3

Rob had reached the first island. He’d been searching fruitlessly for nearly 40 minutes when he heard them. The bells. Being so much closer now, they were even clearer. He fell to his knees, letting their sensation, their warmth, wash over him. For a moment, he knew bliss.

The bells rolled back, like the ocean at low tide. Rob found himself shivering on the ground. He could hear nothing but frogs and crickets.

He rose on unsteady legs, sure of only one thing. In an hour he’d be there, he’d be standing before the Spire. He’d hear the bells, feel them, up close. He ran to the shore and dove into the waters.

Rob emerged from the reservoir onto the rocky bank of the second, and far larger, island. He stumbled barefoot through the woods, increasingly aware of how dark it was beneath the trees. As the bells’ siren call faded in his mind, he began to doubt himself. The Island was nearly two miles long and a half mile across, he could search it all night and never find a damn thing.

The bells chimed once more. He turned to face them. There it was. In the center of a grove of dead trees, the Spire jutted out from the ground like a pike set to receive a charge. Its white paint was oddly untouched by age. Small windows adorned each of its sides. Framed by the dead trees and bathed in moonlight, it called.

Unable to resist their song, yet too overwhelmed by their warmth to walk, Rob crawled to the Spire like an infant to its mother. He pushed against the slats of the window. They gave way and he squirmed his way inside.

Rob landed on the top of a staircase. As the bells continued to chime, he pulled his shuddering body down the stairs, deeper and deeper into the enveloping darkness within, until he lost himself once more in the ethereal sounds and their radiating warmth.

Once the silence returned, Rob strained in vain to see. The air was humid, and black as ink. He could feel wood, dank and rotting, pressed against his bare calves. It gave him the impression he was sitting Indian-style inside of a living thing, like Jonah in the whale.

Slowly, Rob rose to his feet. He held his hands out in front of him and groped blindly. He hoped he’d find a wall or a banister to the stairs, anything that would give him a clue about his surroundings. Instead he found nothing, forcing him to shuffle deeper into the impermeable darkness.

His outstretched fingers recoiled from the soft surface they encountered. What was it? He shook as he reached out, letting his hands land once more on the chest-high object in front of him.

It was wrapped in cloth. It only extended out to about the width of his shoulders. The cloth hung loose over something hard that his hands couldn’t identify. Rods? Dowels? His probing fingers traced up the object’s outer edge until he felt something he could identify. He froze. His fingers were in the eye socket of a skull. His thumb rested on its teeth.

The bells rang again, if only inside Rob, as his mind’s eye showed him the endless dance. He’d sat there in the dark, his unseeing eyes transfixed by the clockmaker’s wife as she was dragged on her post through the twirling gauntlet of Union automatons. He saw her, alive and dead, the blush of youth, the maggots of decay, twitch and scream and moan as her body was pierced by countless bayonets. He saw her face as she ran the endless race.

Rob shrank and shriveled, collapsing to the floor. Like a wounded animal, he crawled and clawed his way back. Back, back, back. Until he hit the wall, and even then he didn’t stop but pushed against it with all his strength, hoping to retreat further.

His flailing limbs struck a step, the first of many. With what little control he had over his frenzied mind, bolted for the surface, and an escape from the moist pit. And the clockmaker’s wife.

Rob scrambled up the twisting stairs on all fours like a dog. He tore his way through the window and collapsed on the ground. The fresh air felt alien in his lungs, as if it were his first breath. He took two more as he lay there on the ground, before realizing that although he hadn’t a clue what time it was, he couldn’t be there when the bells chimed.

“He ran and swam and ran and swam and didn’t look back again until he was in the car.” Fletch put his face in his hands. “I shouldn’t have let him go alone.”

“So you believe him?” I tried to say it in as comforting a tone as I could, but I think it came out a little accusatory.

Fletch hesitated. “Yeah. Yeah, I do.”

I had so many more questions I wanted to ask, but I didn’t think Fletch could take it. He’d choked up several times while relaying Rob’s story, and the way his shoulders were slumped reminded me of the way Rob’s parents had looked at their son’s funeral.

“I should have gone with him,” he said, without looking up at me.

I let it lie.

As I left Fletch’s house, every hair on my body was standing on end, but at that point, as much as I wanted to, I still wasn’t ready to accept the story of the Spire in the Woods. Not at face value. When we’d studied The Fall of the House of Usher in English earlier that year, Mrs. Thorn had made it a point to draw our attention to two of Poe’s opium references and to how Roderick Usher displayed symptoms of withdrawal. She explained that Poe’s stories frequently incorporated both blatant and subtle references to intoxicants and hallucinogens, in order to enhance the sense of phantasmagoria and help more skeptical readers suspend their disbelief.

I knew very little about depression and even less about antidepressants, but at the time, I didn’t think it was beyond the realm of possibility that Robert Kennan’s encounter with the clockmaker’s wife had more to do with the sudden onset of a major depressive episode than with a dead woman. I spent the night reading about depression, tricyclics, MAO inhibitors, and SSRIs.

There were no answers, just endless possibilities. It wasn’t unheard of for major depressive episodes to be accompanied by delusions or even outright hallucinations. Psychotic disorders were sometimes less obvious in patients whose presenting problem was depression. Hallucinations were rare side effects of SSRIs. MAO inhibitors could cause Serotonin Syndrome, which could cause hallucinations. And that was before getting into the countless drug interactions, which, without knowing exactly what Rob had been taking, I couldn’t even begin to map out.

I knew Scary Kerry would love to hear every last detail Fletch had told me about the Spire in the Woods, but on Tuesday morning I just didn’t feel like tracking her down. I wanted to talk to Alina.

The ride into school hadn’t been as awkward as I had anticipated. Fletch was quieter than usual, and I was content to stare out my window and daydream about what I was going to tell Alina. I wondered what she’d think about Fletch’s story and whether or not I should gloss over my own doubts.

I also wondered if she’d cry. I feel embarrassed, even all these years later, admitting it, but a part of me was hoping she would. Then I’d have an excuse to hug her again. I could be dependable. Comforting. Boyfriend material. It was the kind of fantasy that marked me as a beta-male. The sort of guy who, even in his own daydreams, couldn’t think of a single reason he deserved the girl.

I roved the juniors’ hallway and the cafeteria but couldn’t find Alina anywhere. I heard from DeLuca that she’d called out sick. I spent the rest of the day in a funk.

Kerry and I had gym 7th period, the last class of the day. It was too cold to go out to the fields, so we had to choose between three or four indoor activities. Ordinarily I’d have opted for floor hockey, the only gym class activity I have ever enjoyed, but I felt obligated to update Kerry on what I’d learned about Rob and the Spire, so I joined her in the auxiliary gym for a little ping-pong, a game I had no idea she was so good at.

“Or it could have happened exactly like that,” Kerry said, acing me for the third straight time.

I was surprised that Scary Kerry wasn’t as skeptical as I was. I mean, sure, Kerry absolutely believed in ghosts and, of course, I desperately wanted to; but we weren’t completely credulous about every story we heard. We didn’t relish wandering around graveyards and old buildings for no good reason. We weren’t looking to kill time. We did it because we wanted to find something. We wanted to pull back the curtain and glimpse the grandeur of creation. We wanted to feel small in the presence of the infinite and know, if only for a moment, there was more than food, sex, and the petty minutiae of social interaction.

What it came down to was that while I believed Fletch, and I believed that Fletch believed Rob, it didn’t follow that I believed Rob. It was the difference between lying and just being wrong. Kerry and I had developed criteria for identifying the more promising leads, and the Spire in the Woods had a lot going against it. Secondhand accounts. Stories with an undercurrent of social control. Witnesses with a history of mental illness. These were red flags, and Rob’s story had all of them.

“You wanna check it out?”

“It’s kinda cold for a swim.”

“I just wanna see if we can hear the bells.”

“Yeah, maybe. I dunno. It’s kinda far.”

Of course, there was another reason I was reluctant to head all the way out to the Quabbin Reservoir with Scary Kerry. She looked at me like I had just insulted her; she knew precisely what my other reason was. Our last ghost hunting expedition had been a disaster. A very personal disaster.

Kerry was old for our year. She turned 16 at the tail end of freshman year and had gotten her license the very first day of summer break. It was perfect, save for one thing: no car.

Kerry’s parents were divorced, and her dad had moved to New Jersey for a job. He paid his alimony and child support every month, but he just wasn’t a very wealthy man. Kerry’s mom had never gone to college. She had to work full-time at the deli counter at our local Market Basket just to make ends meet, which meant, most days, she had the car.

But at night, when the store was closed, Kerry had access to the world’s oldest, crappiest station wagon. For the most part, Kerry’s newfound freedom changed her life very little. Mainly, her trips involved picking up the members of her small group of friends and delivering them to Dan Burgen’s to watch anime and old horror movies in his basement. We only hung out twice that summer; both times Scary Kerry picked me up in what I called ‘Ecto-1,’ and we went ghost hunting.

Our first trip was to the Blood Cemetery. That’s how we discovered the story of Abel Blood was a steaming load. We dressed in all black (par for the course in Kerry’s case) and brought flashlights, wax paper, and crayons. I also took the silver crucifix my parents had given me as a first communion present and my mother’s Bible, just in case we saw something. It was fun scrambling over the old stone wall, sneaking through the cemetery with our flashlights held low, trying not to step on anybody’s grave.

Even after seeing that the years of death didn’t line up, we still checked out the curve where the ghost of the little girl supposedly ran out in front of passing cars. The blind curve was indeed full of skid marks. It also had, about twenty feet in front of it, a “Deer Crossing” sign.

Two or three weeks later, we went to a charity auction at the rec center and slipped up the stairs to the attic. The stairs squeaked beneath our feet and even though, at worst, we’d just be thrown out of the rec center, we were terrified of getting caught.

The attic hadn’t changed in the seven or so years since my last visit. A couple of card tables housed bins full of crafting materials, a pair of filing cabinets sat against the back wall gathering dust, and most importantly of all, despite it being June, there were still cold spots.

We’d stand just outside of one, reach an arm in, and try to define the boundary of the warm and cold air. It was tricky. The shift in temperature wasn’t as great as I remembered from when I was a kid and there were no hard, fine edges between the hot and the cold air. The temperature just seemed to bleed from one area into another, like brine in an estuary.

I experimented sticking my crucifix into the heart of the cold spot, and felt nothing. If anything, it felt like the cold spots were fading away. Kerry suggested we tried talking to the ‘spirit’ of Jennifer Wilkins while we still could.

I shrugged. “After you.”

We’d forsaken most of our ghost hunting kit as it would have been awfully conspicuous carrying around a Bible and a couple of flashlights. I still had my crucifix, but I doubted it’d be necessary. The stories of the Silver Specter were all quite tame. We had, however, brought a couple of sticks of incense, which we lit with a very old Zippo that had once belonged to my grandfather. Kerry had bought the incense from a new-age store, the sort of place you’d shop at if you were inclined to believe in Neo-Paganism or healing crystals. The saleswoman told her it was supposed to make it easier for spirits to pass into our realm, but to me, it just smelled like sandalwood.

Kerry spoke in a lilting tone, “Jennifer, are you here with us?”

I burst out laughing and Kerry went beet red. She punched me in the arm and whispered for me to be quiet, pointing to the floor where beneath our feet the auction was taking place.

Kerry tried again, “Jennifer, if you can hear me, give us a sign!”

We stood still in absolute silence, waiting for an answer. It came in the form of the industrial air conditioner, mounted to the ceiling of the floor below us, cycling on. A few gaps in the floor boards lined up perfectly with one of the AC’s large vents. We couldn’t stop laughing as ‘the spirit of Jennifer Wilkins’ returned the cold spots to full force.

Once we’d regained our composure, Kerry and I decided to head over to Bickford’s for a bite to eat while we conducted the post-mortem on our latest failure. Now, a deer crossing sign and an air conditioner don’t necessarily disprove that the Blood Cemetery and our town rec center are haunted, but they certainly had made us feel rather foolish, so while I gorged myself on eggs Benedict (which I had only recently discovered) and Kerry nursed a cup of coffee, we started tossing around ideas for other expeditions.

“No place local.” She said. “Gotta stay objective. It can’t be some place we’ve grown up thinking’s haunted.”

“You just don’t want anyone we know hearing your little sing-talking-to-the-spirit-world voice.”

Kerry, in mock anger, reached over, grabbed a home fry off of my plate, and threw it at me. It had taken her a long time to get comfortable with me teasing her. I guess after a lifetime of being mocked about her weight and appearance, the idea that it was the only way I expressed affection took some getting used to.

There were a few places in and around Boston we wanted to check out, but most of them were landmarks or buildings that were still in use. Neither of us was eager to get arrested, particularly not Kerry who was going to have a hard enough time getting into college; so Boston was out, and most of Lowell too. We dismissed a couple of nearby leads: the Gilson Road Cemetery, which had no actual history surrounding it, just a hodgepodge of random urban legends, and the Blue Lady out in Wilton, NH, who sounded somewhat promising but was most frequently sighted during harvest moons, which we wouldn’t get until late September.

Eventually we settled on the Eunice Williams Covered Bridge in Greenfield, Massachusetts. It had everything going for it: a traumatic death, consistent sightings, and no air conditioning. The only downside was that, for us, Greenfield was a solid two-hour drive each way, and that was if the MapQuest directions were up to date (a mighty big “if”).

I didn’t see Kerry again that summer. Life just got in the way. For Kerry, it was difficult to work around her mom’s schedule, especially after a tiny little accident she had backing out of a space at the mall resulted in her losing her driving privileges for a month. While for me, it was the pool Kristy McDowell’s parents had put in that June. While my feelings for Kristy and our other mutual female friends were mostly platonic, I was fifteen, and they were in bikinis. By comparison, ghost hunting just didn’t seem quite as exciting. Knowing how my friends felt about her, I never invited Kerry to tag along. Of course, in fairness to me, pool parties weren’t exactly her cup of tea.

When school started up again in the fall, Kerry and I resumed talking about our trip to Greenfield, but it wasn’t until Rob Kennan killed himself and I made an effort to spend more time with her that we got around to actually going. Kerry picked me up early one Friday evening in mid-November. Mrs. Peterson had opened the store that morning and would be closing the next day, meaning we had Ecto-1 all night. We just needed to get the car back before she woke up and she’d be none the wiser.

Driving around with friends was still novel at that point in my life. The two hours passed by in a blur of jokes and gossip and screaming along to what little music Kerry and I could agree on. She used to have this mix tape dominated by Nine Inch Nails and Rage Against the Machine that was a staple of our time in Ecto-1. I think we listened to it straight through two and a half times that night.

We only got turned around once, and arrived at the Eunice Williams Covered Bridge absolutely pumped. We pulled into the bridge, cut the motor, honked once and waited for Eunice.

Eunice Williams was not a resident of Greenfield. She had actually lived in nearby Deerfield, back in the late 1600s. At the time, Deerfield was the northwesternmost outpost of New England, deep in the heart of the former Pocumtuck nation.

Before the settlers had arrived in Deerfield, the Pocumtuck had already been weakened by European diseases and war with the Mohawk People. When the settlers and Pocumtuck clashed over resources, the settlers easily drove the remaining Pocumtuck from their land.

The Pocumtuck, however, were not ready to admit defeat. They allied themselves with French settlers and other French-aligned First Peoples in Canada and, in 1704, led an offensive raid against Deerfield’s English settlers. The French and Native Americans killed 56 settlers and burned much of the town to the ground. They captured over a hundred survivors, and forced them to march through brutal winter conditions into Quebec. The march would take months.

Among the captured survivors was Eunice Mather Williams, her husband, Minister John Williams, and five of their seven children. Her infant daughter and six-and-a-half-year-old son were both killed during the raid, but John and Eunice were determined to be strong for their other children and fellow captives. The Williamses quoted scripture, led the group in prayer, and took turns carrying their younger children until they reached the Green River.

Eunice fell during the crossing.

Despite having survived her plunge, a Pocumtuck warrior decided that Eunice’s exposure to the icy water had weakened her too much to continue the march, so he hacked her to pieces in front of her husband and their remaining children.

Legend has it that Eunice appears on the bridge over the waters where she was killed, asking any mortals she finds there of news about her children and husband. Locals say she can be summoned simply by cutting your engine and honking your horn.

We’d been sitting there in Ecto-1 with the engine off and no heat, when a thought occurred to me: “Why would the ghost of a woman who died a couple of centuries before the invention of the automobile respond to a horn being honked?”

I could see the gears turning in Scary Kerry’s head as she processed the anachronism. “Well...maybe she’s just...fuck!”

I laughed as Kerry turned on the car to get the heat going again. “And you couldn’t’ve thought of this before we drove out here?” she asked.

“Well, doesn’t mean the bridge isn’t haunted. Just that Eunice probably isn’t a car gal.”

We waited for a bit, then got out of the car and poked around the bridge on foot. I’ve always liked covered bridges, ever since seeing Disney’s the Legend of Sleepy Hollow cartoon as a kid, and there’s a nifty little plaque at this one that tells the whole story of Eunice Williams.

We scrambled down to the banks of the river. It’s not exactly the Mississippi, but it was easy to see how difficult it would have been to ford, especially under the strained circumstances Eunice was facing. I skipped a few pebbles, a difficult feat in fast-moving water, before we got cold and decided to return to the car.

Maybe it was the increasingly likely prospect that another of our missions was going to prove to be a waste, or maybe it was just the hour and the warm air of the heater blasting in our faces and making us sleepy, but whatever the cause, our energy was fading fast and our conversation had turned serious. Well, serious by high school standards.

“Do you think Kim Murray is pretty?”

Kim Murray. I did not think she was pretty, but that put me in a precarious position. Physically Kim had her faults, but, objectively speaking, she was significantly more attractive than Kerry, a girl Drew DeLuca once described, with what was for Drew a considerable amount of sympathy, as “unfortunate-looking.”

Kerry shifted in her seat to face me.

“I dunno. Never gave it much thought, I guess. Why?”

“We were at Dan’s the other night, and she was talking about how much she likes knowing that guys masturbate while thinking about her.”

“Yeah, I don’t think this is a topic of conversation I want to pursue.”

Kerry grunted softly. “That’s what I said. It’s kinda gross.” There was a pause. When Kerry spoke again, her voice caught in her throat. “And then Kim said, ‘Well then, I guess you're lucky you don’t have to worry about anyone doing it over you.’”

My cheeks burned with embarrassment. I didn’t know what to say. I never imagined Kerry would share her sexual insecurities with me, in part because I never thought of her in sexual terms. On some level, I don’t think it ever fully processed for me that Kerry was a girl, like Alina or Kristy. That’s not to say I was confused about her gender identity, but that, because I found her unattractive, my mind had neutered her, had significantly reduced her as a human being.

Kerry started to cry and I leaned over to give her a hug. She let a few hushed sobs out into my shoulder as I patted her broad back. At some point she stopped crying. It took me a second to notice, but what I thought was her taking a shuddering breath, or maybe just a tear-covered cheek sliding over my skin, was actually Kerry kissing my neck.

I wanted to leap into the backseat, to lurch away from Kerry and retreat into the furthest recess of Ecto-1. I wanted to throw open my door, sprint to the nearest house and demand that its occupants permit to shower. But I couldn’t do that. As revolted as I was that my actions and intentions had been so wildly misconstrued, Kerry was still my friend. And she was vulnerable, and she didn’t deserve that.

I froze, hoping she’d realize I wasn’t reciprocating. The nuzzling and kissing continued. I guess she didn’t, or maybe she didn’t realize that this was a red flag— we never spoke about what happened in Greenfield— but either way, she needed a clearer stop sign. I put my hands on her shoulders and gently pushed myself away from her.

She got the message.

“I just...I don’t...I don’t think of you like that...” I had trouble spitting it out.

She nodded.

“We’re friends,” I said.

“Uh-huh.”

The trip home was one of the longest car rides of my life. Kerry never turned on the radio. The only words out of my mouth were the turns I called out off of our Mapquest directions.

I felt shallow. I think we both knew that I’d only said, “we’re friends” to soften the blow. I wouldn’t have dismissed the affections of any of my other female friends so readily. Even Kristy McDowell, whom I’d been friends with since the third grade, I would never have pushed away like that.

The following Monday, I made it a point to talk to Kerry in class like nothing had happened. She played along for a bit, but then asked me for a little space. Frankly, I was relieved to give it to her.

I only told a couple of people about Scary Kerry kissing my neck. DeLuca thought it was hilarious. He wasn’t the most sensitive guy in the world. Kristy was a bit more sympathetic. She reminded me I was entitled to have my tastes. I appreciated hearing it, but I still felt like a shit. I had set out to make Kerry feel better about herself, and had done nothing of the kind. And I never thought of myself as the sort of guy who’d judge a girl based on her looks, but apparently I was.

Alina didn’t return to school for a whole week after our last conversation. She told everyone who asked that she’d had the flu, but later confessed to me that she couldn’t take being surrounded by people. Too noisy. Too overwhelming. Too many eyes staring at her. She needed to be alone.

I didn’t see her at lunch that day, or ever again. The anxiety she felt being surrounded by people was at its worst when she was trying to eat. So her parents arranged for her to eat in her guidance counselor’s office. When I found out, I knew it was good for Alina, but I couldn’t help but feel like my days would be a little drearier without being able to see her across the cafeteria. Her wild hair. That smirk (if it ever returned). And that was to say nothing of the wonder that years of track and cross country had done for her legs.

I finally caught up with her on Friday morning. She was at her locker. To cut down on the amount of time she had to spend jammed between chatty classmates, Alina had taken to cramming every book and binder she’d need until lunch into her backpack. She looked like a freshman.

“Hey, Alina.”

She didn’t look up. “Oh, hey,” she mumbled.

I dropped down next to where she was crouching, and lowered my voice. “I spoke with Fletch.”

Alina froze. I couldn’t tell if she was nervous or excited. She took a couple of deep breaths as she turned towards me. “Did you see it?”

“Yeah. Basically said the same thing as yours.” She deflated, but I continued. “But then he told me what happened. You gonna be at lunch?”

She bit her lower lip as she considered for a second. “No.”

“Oh. Well, we could—”

“What do you have last period?”

“Just gym.”

“Can you skip it?”

I’d never cut a class in my life. “Absolutely.”