Spire in the Woods/1

Robert Edward Kennan killed himself in the Fall of 1999. I wasn’t there but it’s where my story begins. It begins with Rob, 17 years old, sitting in a burning car in the middle of a crowded parking lot one Monday night in October. He burned for nearly four hours before the police let the firemen near enough to put out the flames and pull out his body. I didn’t know him. Not really. We lived in a small town. I knew him by sight, knew his name, but I doubt we’d ever exchanged more than a few perfunctory words. It makes me feel funny talking about him, like I’m not justified doing it, but if I’m going to tell you about the Spire, it’s unavoidable. I have to tell you about Robert Edward Kennan and how the suicide notes he left behind tangled my life up with his.

Back then, we both lived in a sleepy town in New England, a little over an hour northwest of Boston, just across the New Hampshire border. It’s the sort of place that’s nice to live, if you’re the sort of person that doesn’t like doing very much. There’s really only three reasons anyone ever steps foot in my hometown. The first is that they’re on their way to Nashua, the shopping Mecca of the northeast. The second would be the ice cream. We have a dairy farm where they sell the world’s best ice cream. All of it made right there on the premises. And the third is because they bought one of those “Haunted New England” books.

Usually, you can find our town listed in those books twice. The first entry will likely be the story of how our high school, which is one of the ten oldest in the country, came to have the Silver Specter as its mascot. I always loved the Spector. It reflected how steeped in folklore rural New England once was, and, as mascots go, it’s much more interesting than the “Fighting (fill in the cat species here)” everyone else seems saddled with.

Way back in the 1890s there was a terrible blizzard. A proper nor’easter. It dumped several feet of snow across the whole region. There were many, many casualties, mostly the very young and very old stuck in their homes without heat. One of the exceptions, who was neither very young nor very old, was Jennifer Wilkins. She was a teacher, trapped in the school when the blizzard hit.

What little food there was in the school house couldn’t have lasted more than two days, and folks say by the fifth, she had resorted to boiling her boots, to soften up the leather for eating. It was two weeks before anyone was able to reach her. They found her, body thin as a matchstick, wrapped up in a gray wool blanket. If only they’d had paste in those days, she might have made it.

That old school house is now our town rec center. Supposedly, old Jenny still haunts its halls, wrapped in that gray wool blanket, her hollow, emaciated visage searching in vain for something to eat.

Once, when I was eight or nine years old, long before I knew the origins of the Silver Specter, I went up into the rec center’s attic alone. It was August, and I had snuck away from the rest of the summer reading program and my own interminable boredom. The dusty attic was filled with broken furniture and plastic bins containing the crafting supplies for all of the daycare programs. It would have been entirely forgettable if not for the drafts.

The summer had been hot and humid, but in the rec center’s attic, if you stepped in the wrong spot it’d get so cold that you could practically see your breath. I told my mom about it, and she was the one who told me about Jenny. I never went back up there alone.

The second story you typically find in those books is about the Blood cemetery. It’s real name is the Pine Hill Cemetery, but nobody calls it that. They call it the Blood Cemetery because it’s supposedly haunted by Abel Blood and his family.

According to legend, Abel Blood lived in the center of what is now the cemetery back when it was farmland. He returned from the fields early one day to find his wife in bed with another man— a tall, dark-haired stranger. Abel was stunned. How could Mrs. Blood, a good Christian woman, do such a thing? Obviously this scoundrel was forcing himself on his wife!

Abel retrieved his pitchfork and charged back into the house, his mind full of vengeance. But as he drew near, he heard his wife— mid-coitus— proclaim her love for the black-haired stranger, and with a note of satisfaction to her call that Abel had never heard before. Mr. Blood saw red.

He burst into the room, pitchfork held aloft, and ran them through. Over and over, he plunged the fork into their tangled bodies, before finally leaving them pinned, one on top of the other, to the bed beneath them.

Looking at the bloody mess he’d made, Abel found his rage had not diminished. This seemed curious to Abel but it dawned on him why when he spied a picture of his family on the mantel. His children didn’t look anything like him, nor like their mother. They were all exceptionally tall, with full heads of somewhat greasy black hair.

Abel waited, standing in the puddle of blood that had only moments ago been coursing through Mrs. Blood and her lover, and stewed in his ever deepening anger. He was a cuckold. He had no heir. He’d been raising another man’s children. A man who had been bedding Abel’s wife. For years. Abel waited and stewed for several hours until his four children arrived home from school.

They say his sons and eldest daughter put up a noble fight, but they were children fighting a grown man whose muscles had been hardened by a lifetime of farm labor. Only Abel’s youngest daughter, barely 5 years old, made it out of the house alive. She sprinted as fast as her little legs could carry her in a desperate attempt to reach her neighbors. But even with her head start her little legs were no match for her father’s powerful strides. Just as she scrambled up over the stone wall separating their farm from the Hollises’, Abel picked up one of the stones and smashed it down on her head.

These days, if you go there, on the road that borders the cemetery you’ll see this curve full of skid marks. People say that they’re caused by cars swerving to avoid an oddly dressed little girl who runs out into the street each night.

Back home, we had a rite of passage. As soon as you or one of your friends were old enough to drive, you had to trespass into the Blood Cemetery at night and make a rubbing of the Blood Family’s gravestones. I did it. And you should feel free to, but be prepared to be disappointed because none of the Bloods died on the same date.

A lot of ghost stories are like that. Doesn’t mean they’re not fun, but what you come to realize as you get older is that they’re mostly a form of social control. Jennifer Wilkins really did die a horrible death, but the story of Abel Blood is nothing but a fantasy story with a rather dark, misogynistic message: cheat on your husband and he’ll kill you. I loved ghost stories growing up. Loved them. That’s what gave me my not-entirely-unearned reputation as “the spooky kid.” It was the reason that about a month after he died, Rob Kennan’s suicide note wound up in my lap. There, buried in the middle of apologies to his family and clear evidence of severe depression, was my first push towards the Spire in the Woods, the only ghost story I truly believe.

In 1999, I was a sophomore in high school. Rob was a senior. He wasn’t what you’d call real popular. Part of it was that he wasn’t born in my hometown, but moved there in the seventh grade, right when kids are at their cruelest. The first I ever heard of him was a year later. There was a rumor floating around that he and a mentally handicapped girl were found naked in the woods together. The implication being that he’d tricked her into having sex with him. A couple of years later, I heard another, that his parents were forced to move because Rob had been molested by their old priest down in Amherst.

To the best of my knowledge these stories are entirely untrue, and I’m deeply ashamed to admit that when I was in the sixth grade, I did gleefully repeat that first one. I found it funny at the time. The second I also repeated. Just not as glibly. I whispered it to my friends, adopting a sage tone and offering it as an explanation for why the first rumor was probably true.

I felt so goddamn smart. I had the inside scoop, something interesting to say, and everyone wanted to listen to me. I wish I’d kept my mouth shut. I wasn’t smart. I was just kicking a kid while he was down, spreading the lies that may have contributed to him killing himself.

The rumors followed Rob everywhere. He was a quiet kid. By all accounts very bright and kind. And I want to be clear here, he did have people who cared about him. Friends. Not many, and maybe they weren’t too popular either, but they were there and they were nice guys. One of them was my ride to school, Nathan ‘Fletch’ Fletcher.

Fletch and I lived in the same neighborhood. We were never all that close, but we got along well enough. He was a lovable goofball, always saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, but it never got him down. He had this grin that stretched from ear to ear, and he always managed to get me excited about his latest musical discovery or restoration project.

Fletch used to buy old cars, fix them up, and resell them. While it helped pad his savings for college, it also meant he was stuck driving whatever hunk of junk he hadn’t managed to fix up enough to sell yet. That year, Fletch was driving a 1984 Honda Civic.

I still hate that car.

I found out something was wrong on Tuesday morning when Fletch’s rust-bucket didn’t show up in my driveway like it usually did. Instead his dad, an air force officer nowhere near as affable as his son, was waiting for me. I liked Mr. Fletcher fine; he was a good— if not particularly affectionate— father to his boys and a respectful neighbor, but his presence in my driveway was odd, especially since I could see that Fletch wasn’t in the car.

“Sir, is everything OK with Nate?”

“Yeah, he’s fine. We’re just giving him the day off from school. C’mon, grab your bag. I’ll explain on the way.”

Mr. Fletcher had turned around and started back towards his car before he’d even finished speaking. I grabbed my back pack and hustled after him.

“Did you know the Kennan boy?” He asked as we pulled out of my driveway.

“Not really. I mean, I know who he is. One of Nate’s friends.”

Mr. Fletcher nodded, never taking his eyes off the road.

“He killed himself last night.” He said it as evenly as if had been announcing we needed to stop for gas.

“He—what?” My brain couldn’t even process what I was hearing. I’d seen Rob Kennan in the hallway yesterday. How could he be dead? Mr. Fletcher proceeded to lay out the cold, dry facts. Rob had hand-delivered a letter to the house around 7 pm. Fletch wasn’t home when Rob dropped it off, so he didn’t open it until later that night, at 9:45 or so. Upon reading the letter, Fletch went white as a ghost and tore out of the house without permission. He raced to (I’m going to omit this detail— just know it’s the location that Rob killed himself), but when he arrived, the car was already burning. Apparently, the letter was a suicide note.

“Nathan’s too upset for school.”

Something in how he said it, made it seem like Mr. Fletcher was implying there was something unmanly about his 17 year-old son being too upset to sit through pre-calculus after one of his best friends had killed himself.

“He should have called you,” Mr. Fletcher continued, “but he didn’t think to and it didn’t occur to me until it was too late for you to catch the bus. Sorry about that.”

My initial shock gave way to resentment. No one could have made Rob Kennan’s suicide pleasant news, but it was difficult to imagine anyone being more callous than Mr. Fletcher. No wonder Fletch complained about his father so much.

“Don’t worry about it.” I mumbled.

We rode the rest of the way in silence.

I got to school and found it changed. Compared to the day before, it was an alien landscape. It reminded me of Tartaros in Greek mythology: a bunch of people, milling about, a vacant and lost look in their eyes, unsure of what to do, what to say to one another. Friends clustered, silently, in small groups. It was like Rob’s funeral was being held in the hallways.

Classes weren’t cancelled but nothing was done. Mainly the teachers made us aware of special counseling being offered for anyone closely affected and told us that we could come to them if we ever needed to. Their nerves were also frayed. I recall specifically my study hall teacher, normally a very soft-spoken man, banging his hand on his desk and swearing that it was “completely fucking unnecessary!” Adding a moment later that “no one needs to do that. No one.”

We, all of us, drifted through the day in a haze. You’d hug your friends and ask them how they were holding up, or how well they knew Rob. You’d hear about who was there that night at (the omitted location was a popular teen hangout). And you heard about the cops that could have saved him but didn’t.

I mentioned earlier that Rob Kennan was left in his burning car for four hours. This is not an exaggeration. It was four hours. Later reports said less time had passed, but Fletch was there, screaming himself hoarse. Screaming at cops and firemen and anyone who would listen that that was his friend in there and he was dying. It was four hours. Being teenagers, we were quick to question the actions of the police, but I now believe that, while their delay proved to be without merit, they made the best decision they could have with the information available to them. Rob hadn’t lit himself on fire to be dramatic. He didn’t intend for there to be a fire at all. Rob had wanted to shoot himself but couldn’t acquire a gun, so he built one.

Back then, in the ‘90s, in a pre 9-11 world, terrorism wasn’t part of the zeitgeist. It was bad, absolutely terrible, and we knew it. We’d had Timothy McVeigh and the failed bombing of the Twin Towers, but we hadn’t entered into the Neo-McCarthyism that marked much of the early 2000s, where the mere whisper of the word could get you thrown off an airline or placed on an FBI watchlist. And there was a certain caché, a mystique that some of the equipment and ideas surrounding terrorism carried in the imaginations of adolescent boys, which is probably why Rob Kennan, like virtually every other guy I knew growing up, had copies of the Anarchist Cookbook and the Terrorist’s Handbook* saved to a 3.5 floppy disk that he had stashed in his room.

When he failed to get a gun, he built one. I’m a little wary to Google it, but if my memory serves me, the instructions for it were listed in one of those text files as the home-brew blast cannon.** Rob’s blast cannon consisted of little more than a lead pipe capped on one end and filled with gunpowder and bits of metal. It did the trick, but it also launched burning gunpowder all over the interior of his car.

Some of the people at the scene thought they had seen someone else in the car with Rob, a girl, and relayed this information to officer McCullough who was the first emergency responder to arrive. Officer McCullough hadn’t seen anyone else in the car. All he saw was a burning car, a crowd of teenagers who all reported having heard an explosion, and the lead pipe that had rolled out of Rob’s unconscious hand and onto the passenger’s side of the floor.

Terrorism may not have been a big part of the zeitgeist at the time, but school shootings were. The Columbine massacre had happened only 6 months prior, and Officer McCullough was looking at a fairly typical teen loner, reports of an explosion, and what very well could have been an undetonated pipe bomb still in the burning car. He made a tough call. It may have cost Rob Kennan his life, but, then again, he might already have been dead. You have to ask yourself, about what that officer did: was it worth risking more lives to find out?

I remember thinking that Officer McCullough, at that point only known to me as the cop who always gave kids a hard time for riding their bikes without a helmet, was a bastard. And maybe he was a bastard, but if he was, it wasn’t because of this. He couldn’t risk more lives. Besides, whether or not it was a suicide, if there had been a second person in the car, where the hell was she?

Nobody who knew Robert Edward Kennan at all—even people like me who barely knew him—believed for a second that he was out to kill a whole bunch of people. But there was something else that could have been going on…Rob had a crush on a girl that bordered on obsession. It had lasted years and only seemed to be getting worse.

The girl in question, Alina, worked at (omitted location), and Rob would go out of his way to stand in her line or linger in the parking lot after-hours hoping to speak with her as she was heading home. Everyone immediately wondered if the mystery girl in the fire had been Alina. Did he pull her into his car to once more profess his love for her, and, unable to handle another rejection, take his own life before her eyes? Or, God forbid, try to take Alina with him?

Alina’s friends and coworkers shouted her name. “Alina! Alina! Where are you?”

When she didn’t respond they fanned out to look for her. It was the manager, Mrs. Jaffrey who found her. Completely overwhelmed by Rob’s suicide, Alina had retreated into one of the walk-in freezers. She was bawling her eyes out as Mrs. Jaffrey threw her coat over Alina’s shoulders and led her to the manager’s office.

“It’s not your fault,” the older woman whispered into Alina’s ear, but it didn’t do any good.

No one else was unaccounted for, and no mystery woman was ever found. No second “bomb” ever exploded and no accomplices ever turned up. I guess we all assumed that those eyewitnesses were mistaken. That the smoke and the flames had played a trick on their eyes. We were wrong.

Fletch wasn’t in school for the rest of that week and I didn’t see him around the neighborhood either. I hate to admit it, but it was sort of a relief. I had no idea what I was going to say to him. What do you really say to someone whose friend has just killed himself?

In the weeks that followed, a new form of gossip slowly crept into the hallways of the school. The special counseling held in the cafeteria every morning before homeroom was supposed to be a safe space, where anyone could share their feelings without fear of judgment and be secure in the knowledge that it would go no further. So naturally, it was all anyone wanted to talk about.

There was a strong backlash against the kids that the other students didn’t feel deserved to be there. People who presented themselves as having been very close with Rob, but who in truth rarely spoke with him. Several of my close friends had been at (omitted) that night, they had watched Rob burn, seen him die and, although they were deeply affected, they weren’t even entirely comfortable being there amongst his handful of close friends and, of course, Alina. I felt terrible for Alina Aminev. Sitting there in the cafeteria, surrounded by Rob’s grieving friends, listening to everyone tiptoe around blaming her...they never came out and said it, but they’d talk about how “girls” wouldn’t give him the time of day. How “someone” had recently ripped out his heart. And when the counselor spoke about how challenging it can be to cope with the insensitivity of other teens, many in the room cast sidelong glances in her direction, waiting for her reaction before adding in their own two cents.

The year before Rob’s death, Alina had suddenly found herself with a kind of unexpected popularity. She was born in Russia, but her parents had managed to emigrate to the United States when Alina was still an infant (which was, during the tail end of the Cold War, no easy feat). Kids used to tease her about her family being Soviet spies, but when she started to come into her own, the teasing turned to flirting. She never quite reached the ranks of our school’s alpha females, but her je ne sais quoi was undeniable. Alina was pretty, sure, but not unattainably so. She was smart but not so much so that it was intimidating. She had fair skin and wild hair. Her eyes would sparkle whenever she said something clever, and she had this smirk that’d spread like a wave from left to right across her lips. But most alluring of all, Alina had this attitude, this way of carrying herself. It was like she was sure wherever she was, was the place to be. It was infectious.

In short, Alina Aminev was exactly the kind of girl that an unpopular guy could fool himself into thinking he had a chance with. God knows I did when I found myself suddenly talking to her in late November of 1999.

Alina had grown quieter in the weeks that followed Rob’s death. Even as the rest of the school began to show signs of moving on, she continued to retreat. She quit her job, and, though I don’t quite remember when the season started and stopped, either quit or never signed up for cross country that year. She just sort of shut herself off from the world and everyone in it, which was why I was so surprised to see her at Drew DeLuca’s birthday party.

She looked nervous. This used to be her element, and no one at Drew’s that night was inclined to blame her for Rob’s death. This was not his circle of friends, this was hers. But whenever she approached someone, or tried to join in a conversation, she looked like a gazelle approaching a watering hole it wasn’t sure was safe. And once she was in the conversation, she mainly shifted her weight from foot to foot, or fidgeted with some part of her outfit, never really engaging anyone unless they addressed her directly. I was telling a friend of mine about a recent trip I had taken to Greenfield with Scary Kerry, the only one I could ever drag along on my ghost-hunting trips, when I felt a gentle tug on the back of my shirt. I turned around half expecting to see DeLuca’s kid sister, but it was Alina.

“Can we talk?”

“Oh, yeah, sure.”

“Outside?” She looked over my shoulder at my friend before adding, “Alone?”

If it had been spring, I would have been thrilled by the prospect of Alina Aminev pulling me out of a party to “talk” alone. But it wasn’t spring; it was New Hampshire in late November. We stood on the back deck, our jackets pulled tightly around us, our breath hanging in the air plain to see.

She said she heard from Kristy McDowell that I knew a lot about ghost stories. Kristy was quite possibly my oldest friend in the world, and yes, it was true. I knew a lot about ghost stories. I was raised Catholic and blessed with kind, warm-hearted parents whom I was always eager to please. This meant that I took my Catholicism and my school work very seriously, which eventually led to a struggle between my rational and spiritual beliefs that was only exacerbated by my growing awareness of the sexual abuse scandal and the Church’s subsequent cover-up. I’d hated losing my faith. I wanted desperately to believe as I had as a child. So when most teenagers had shut the book on ghost stories, relegating them to little more than childhood memories or an excuse to scare a girl you wanted to put your arm around, I doubled down. I thought if I could find something, some shred of evidence in support of the supernatural, that would keep the door to the spiritual world open for me, even if only for a time.

Of course, I didn’t share all of that with Alina. Instead, I tried to act casual. Casual bordering on slightly disinterested.

“Yeah. Well, kinda.” I think she could see through me. “Why?”

Alina began fishing around inside her jacket. “You have to swear to me that you’ll never tell anyone I showed you this.”

I swore. Alina pulled her hand out from her coat. Her dainty fingers clutched an envelope like it was a particularly delicate piece of glass. She handed me Rob’s suicide note. Opening the envelope and unfolding the pages felt like a profound invasion of privacy. But who could resist reading it when it was handed to you? What were Rob Kennan’s last words to the girl he’d been obsessed with for years? The girl many of his peers believed was the reason he killed himself?

Thirteen years have passed, leaving me with little more than an impression of what the note said, but even if I remembered it exactly, I think this would still be where I’d draw the line. What I will say is that it was very earnest. Rob had been depressed for a long time. He felt horrible about leaving his family and friends to deal with the aftermath of his suicide, but he also felt isolated in a very profound way and, more than anything, just wanted it to stop.

I also don’t mind sharing that he was very effusive in his praises for Alina, but I got the distinct impression he didn’t know her as well as he thought. He wrote about her in these florid terms full of superlatives— twice he said he didn’t think he could live without her— but ultimately, nothing he said was very specific. Everyone thinks the first love of their life is the most special, most attractive person in the world and that no one could ever appreciate them as deeply as they do.

I felt for him. I really did. But reading it, I didn’t feel as though I’d gotten to know him any better. Not really.

As I finished reading, I looked up and met Alina’s gaze. She was looking at me expectantly but I wasn’t making the connection. “What does this have to do with ghost stories?” I asked.

Alina pointed to the bottom of one of the paragraphs expounding on why Rob wanted to take his own life. It read, “And every hour, I see her face, as she runs the endless race.” Her face. I had assumed he was talking about Alina and her years of running track and cross country, but if that was the case, why would he write “her” and not “your” in a letter that was to Alina?

A shiver ran up my spine. It wasn’t the cold. It was more like someone had walked over my grave. “The endless race,” I said.

“Yes!” For a split second, Alina was her former self again. “God, I was starting to think I’d imagined it. Tell me you remember where it’s from.”

I mumbled the line, “And every hour, I see her face, as she runs the endless race,” a couple of times under my breath. I knew that I had heard it before, but where? I was positive it was a ghost story, but I’d read literally hundreds, if not thousands, of them, and they had a tendency to bleed together.

“No.”

“Shit!” Alina banged her fist hard against the railing of the deck. “But it’s a ghost story, right?”

“Yeah. I know I know it, I just can’t...” I trailed off, racking my brain.

Alina started drifting back towards Drew’s house. “If you think of it—”

I cut her off, “Absolutely.” So much for slightly disinterested.

As she reached the door, she turned and looked at me. She stared at me for a long time. Longer than any pause in a conversation should be. “I think he mentioned it in the one he wrote to Nate Fletcher, too.”

I stared back at Alina. “Fletch’s letter?”

“Yeah. Could you find out?”

That was a line I didn’t think I could cross. “Yeah.”