Every House Is Haunted (6 page)

No one ever questioned Soelle’s disappearance. I never called the police, and no one ever came around asking about her. I think it was more than just the town being glad she was gone. Maybe she really didn’t belong here.

I heard from her only once. I got a letter. It was postmarked from a town in Mexico, some place I couldn’t even pronounce. It contained two items. One was a colour photograph of a Mayan pyramid. On the back she had written:
I found it, Toby. It was here all along.

The other item was a playing card.

The ace of diamonds.

I never knew his real name. No one did. When I first started delivering his groceries, I told him mine, thinking he would do the same, but he shook his head.

“Names aren’t important,” he said. “Only the work is important. There will be no names between us. You will be ‘the Boy’ and I will be ‘the Professor.’”

I was sixteen at the time and didn’t particularly like being called a boy. But the Professor was so unusual, so different from any adult I’d ever known, that I didn’t give it much thought. Of course now all I can do is think about him.

I started to ask him about his “work,” but he was already gone, out the back door. I watched him walk into the woods—a common sight, I would eventually discover.

Most people thought he was odd from the moment he arrived in town. For one thing, he referred to himself as a “professor of autumnology”—which is where the nicknames came from—and for another he was from “Away,” which is what we say on Cape Breton Island to describe someone who wasn’t born here.

He had moved into an old house on the outskirts of New Waterford. It was probably the best place for him. It made the townfolk comfortable with him in a way they might not have been otherwise. It’s one of the simple truths we live with out here on the East Coast. The clouds are in the sky, the fish are in the sea, and the weirdos are on the edge of town.

People still wondered how he could live out there, with no electricity and no water except what he brought up from the well. I thought about these things too, but mostly I wondered about his “work,” and why it was so important.

And it was important. I could see it in the Professor’s eyes when he spoke to me. I still see that look in my dreams. I feel it burning a hole through me, but I never turn away from it.

It was on a day in November that he showed me the tree.

I had gone out to deliver the week’s groceries, letting myself in through the front door since the Professor wasn’t always around to hear me knocking. If he was home, we’d talk for a little while, usually about the weather. If he wasn’t, I’d stick around for a bit anyway, unpacking the groceries and telling myself I was just being helpful, that I wasn’t being what my mother called a Nosey Ned.

He wasn’t around that day, so I set to restocking the pantry from the two big paper bags I had carried from town. While I was reaching up to put a box of powdered milk on a high shelf, the back door suddenly opened with a loud screech. The box slipped out of my fingers and bonked me a good one on the head. I didn’t feel it, though. I was too busy gaping at the Professor standing in the doorway, his cheeks rosy as polished apples, the breath fuming out of his mouth in great frosty plumes.

“Someone has to see it,” he gasped. “So I know I’m not crazy.”

He did look a bit crazy, I had to admit. His eyes had the thousand-yard stare you sometimes see in fishermen who have spent their entire lives working on the sea. The eyes of someone who is looking at everything and nothing at the same time.

I was reaching down to retrieve the box of powdered milk when he grabbed my hand and pulled me toward the door. I managed to grab my wool cap off the kitchen table, and then we were outside, headed into the woods.

The dead, naked branches of maple and white birch raked at us like long, bony hands, making harsh scraping sounds against our coats, while our feet kicked through ankle-deep drifts of humus, decaying leaves with bright colours long faded. A branch snagged the wool cap out of my hand. I started to turn back for it and was almost pulled off my feet.

“No time,” the Professor said in a low, desperate voice. Then he uttered a shaky, distracted laugh. “What am I talking about?”

I couldn’t answer that question, and it seemed he couldn’t, either.

We walked for a long time. The overcast sky grew darker by slow, almost imperceptible degrees. The smell of the leaves was almost overpowering. To me it was the smell of seasons dying.

The Professor began to speak. I couldn’t hear everything he said, and the things that I could make out didn’t always make sense. He said there were places in the world where it was like summer all the time, and spring, and winter—
but not autumn
. Oh no, he said, there was no place in the world where it was like autumn all the time. That’s what made it special.

I began to feel afraid. It was getting dark and I was alone in the woods with a strange man who was dragging me God-only-knew where. I could feel the sky pressing down on me. The trees crowded in like co-conspirators in my own abduction. I wanted to leave, I wanted to go back home to my mother.

I was breathing rapidly and I eventually became aware of a smoky smell in the air. Up ahead the trees became less dense and it looked like one of them was on fire. But there was something strange about it. Something I couldn’t pinpoint right away.

We broke into the clearing and stared up at it—an enormous elm with a thick trunk and branches that curved upward like the arms of a candelabrum. It was not like any tree I had ever seen before. It was almost artificial, like a piece of art—a concept that became even more cemented in my mind when I realized the flames which engulfed it weren’t moving.

Something finally clicked in my head. It was like one of those migraine-inducing three-dimensional paintings where you have to sort of cross your eyes to see the hidden image.

There was no smoke because the tree wasn’t on fire.

What I had at first taken to be flames were in fact leaves. The tree hadn’t lost them yet, which was strange in itself, but made even stranger by the intensity of the colours themselves. Starburst yellows, candy-apple reds, and oranges as bright as the vests worn by the hunters who regularly tromped through these woods in search of deer and moose. They were almost too bright to look at.

“How . . .” I began.

The Professor shook his head.

“
When
,” he corrected me, and placed his hand on the rough, almost ornate, bark. “And the answer, my boy, would be autumn. Forever autumn. Right here. In this spot.”

He was exultant, almost reverent, like a priest who has come upon the very first church ever constructed. I thought he would fall on his knees and pay worship to the tree. For a moment I thought I might, too.

“Can you imagine it?” he breathed, staring up into the conflagration of leaves. “A place where it’s like this all the time?”

I didn’t want to imagine it, not then.

It’s hard to explain why the tree frightened me so. I think it was what it represented. A place where it was always autumn. There was something unnatural about the idea. My fear lay in the root of that concept. Unnatural. Un-nature. The tree was something that shouldn’t be. It was a tree out of time. A living monument that shouldn’t exist, and yet at the same time couldn’t be ignored.

I inched back to the edge of the clearing. The tree wasn’t on fire, but a part of me still thought I would get burned if I stood too close to it. I started to back away, and the Professor turned, holding me in his gaze for a moment. There was something in his eyes. Disappointment, maybe. But then he turned back to the tree. When I realized the Professor had no further interest in me, I simply slipped into the woods and left.

I didn’t think I’d be able to find my way back, but I did. I saw my hat hanging on a branch and grabbed it as I ran past.

I never saw the Professor again. I guess he got another boy to deliver his groceries.

That was many years ago. I’m an old man now, as old as the Professor was then. I have a son, and from time to time I see a look of curiosity on his face that is very familiar. It’s like looking into a mirror to the past. I see that look on his face and I find myself thinking back to the Professor’s final words to me, and the world I was too afraid to imagine.

It doesn’t scare me anymore. In fact, it’s a comfort to me now.

I see it when I close my eyes.

A world where the sky is cloaked in perpetual overcast, the scent of woodsmoke is always in the air, and the trees that burn there burn forever.

When the man in the houndstooth jacket stepped through the door, Rachel knew he was going to be trouble. It wasn’t until later, after he had dropped the biggest tip she ever received, that she learned trouble was, in fact, where he was going.

It was a few minutes past eight on a Friday morning and Rachel was nursing a cup of coffee and leafing through the Sutter County
Register
. The breakfast crowd had come and gone, and she expected things to pick up again, oh, sometime tomorrow morning. The Crescent Diner did a good business in the hours between six and eight AM, but afternoons and evenings were deader than disco.

At the moment, the only sounds in the diner were the low gurgling of the Silex and the whisper of the ceiling fans turning overhead. Reg was out back having a smoke and the jukebox (which contained such golden oldies as “Gangsta’s Paradise” and “Mambo No. 5”) was mercifully silent.

The bell over the door jingled, and Rachel was so surprised by the sound that she almost dropped her coffee cup. She looked up from the newspaper and saw a man standing in the doorway.

“Morning,” he said, and gave her a sunny grin. He squinted his eyes in order to read the orange, moon-shaped name-tag pinned to her blue rayon uniform. “Rachel.” He raised a hand in greeting. “I’m Henry.”

The waitress’s first thought was that the man, Henry, had crawled out of a Salvation Army donation bin. In addition to the houndstooth jacket, he wore a paisley shirt, a plaid tie, and a pair of tan slacks so short they looked like flood pants. He was also wearing mismatched socks—one brown, one yellow and covered with a pattern of lobsters. She wondered idly if the circus was in town.

She was about to head out back and tell Reg they had another homeless person in the diner, but something made her wait. She stared at the man a moment longer and realized that, despite his ragged, clownish attire, he clearly wasn’t one of the homeless vags who wandered in from time to time in search of food or money. He was in his late twenties or early thirties. He was thin, clear-eyed, and clean-shaven, and he didn’t give off the stink of either cheap wine or puke.

“Hi Henry,” she said finally.

“I just hitched in.” His jacket opened a bit as he jerked a thumb over his shoulder, and Rachel caught a glimpse of rainbow suspenders. “A trucker named Eddie Ray said if I wanted a good meal I had to stop in at the Crescent.”

“You found it,” Rachel said. “In all its glory.”

“Do you have an extensive menu?”

Rachel blinked. In the five years she had been waitressing, she had never heard that question before. “I’m sorry?”

“Well, I have some time to kill—and an appetite to kill, for that matter—and I was just wondering if your menu has a wide selection. I brought a newspaper—” he patted the rolled up copy of the
Register
under his arm “—and I plan to bivouac in one of your booths for the day. If that’s all right by you.”

“Bivo-what?”

“Bivouac,” he said. “Camp out.”

Rachel was speechless. She was tempted to look out the wide front window and see if there was a camera crew out there. She felt like she was on one of those reality TV shows where they play practical jokes on unsuspecting people.

“We have a pretty good menu . . . I guess.” She made a vague gesture. “Would you like to see it?”

Henry held up his hand. “No need,” he said, still smiling. “I trust you.”

Rachel watched as he went over and took a seat in a corner booth. He put the newspaper on the table and picked up a laminated menu. He began looking it over with the wide-eyed exuberance of a scholar perusing a rare folio edition.

Five minutes later, he summoned Rachel over.

“All set?” she asked.

“Yes. I’d like the Full Moon breakfast—scrambled eggs, sausage, hash browns, toast (white bread, please), melon, and orange juice. I’d also like an extra side of bacon.”

“Coffee?”

“Constantly,” Henry said, and grinned.

Rachel didn’t like that grin. There was something artificial and a little unsettling about it. It stretched too tightly across the skin on his face. Like a skeleton’s grin.

She turned away and went through the swing door to the kitchen. Reg was just coming back in, taking off his coat and hanging it on the wooden peg next to the door.

“We have a customer,” Rachel told him, and recited Henry’s order.

“Really?” Reg said, amused. “Hell must have frozen over.” He slipped his apron on over his head.