The Haunting of Harriet (34 page)

Harriet’s reaction to these “professional” opinions was a loud snort. Jenny was dying to tell her how far her research had got; how close she was to proving Harriet’s existence, but she recognized the need for caution. She did not want to blow the whistle too soon. Her work was nearly completed. It took the form of a scrapbook, following the lines of a narrative piece with each entry backed up by, or justified by, actual data she had collected. It was a masterpiece of detection. There was only one identifiable fault and Jenny did not yet know how she was going to overcome it. Even when presented with all this evidence a sceptic could still deny Harriet’s presence. There was no denying a woman named Harriet had lived and that she had lived here in Beckmans. The story of her brother and the tragic circumstances of his death were recounted in newspaper articles and coroner’s reports. But how could Jenny prove her claims to have had prior knowledge, to have been told the whole story first by Harriet? They could simply say she had seen this information somewhere and registered it subliminally. How could she prove Harriet had played a central, integral part in rescuing James? How does one prove that a ghost is physical? Too much was left unanswered.

Jenny was an exceptionally open child, endowed with considerable psychic gifts herself but not yet tutored in the fine details of mediumship. It had not occurred to her that what she was doing was communicating with the dead. The barriers between life and death had not yet touched her. She had not lost anyone close enough for her to ask the most difficult questions. She believed in right and wrong with the fervour of a caring ten-year-old, but good and evil were not qualities she had really tried to explain. To her innocent mind what was happening was a simple question of fairness. It was not fair that Harriet should go unacknowledged by those people she had helped. Her mother’s forthcoming exhibition was a case in point. Jenny could spot Harriet’s hand in the paintings. She had personal proof of Harriet’s gifts as a teacher and a guide. Why should they take all the glory when Harriet had been denied so much in her own life? Now Jenny had the facts about the Marchant family she felt it her duty to give Harriet the credit due to her.

The only person Jenny knew who might understand was Mel. Since her cancer, Mel was already taking a less prominent role in young Jenny’s life. The incident in the Fourth Room had caused her to step back even further. It had taken a lot out of her. Over the years she had been taught to ration her psychic work so that it never exposed her to the limits of her ability. This had been her first encounter with a total “possession”. The “sad little girl” had been so desperate to get through that she had taken Jenny’s body as a means to communicate. She had tried it before with Liz with a modicum of success, but with a child of similar age the result was a resounding hit. Mel’s knowledge of possession was that it was safe and containable, so long as the spirit was benign. If the intent was malignant, or if the spirit decided to stay in possession of the body it was using, that was altogether a different matter. It was no longer a simple case of asking the spirit to leave. The person possessed was in danger of losing their claim to their physical body, leaving their own spirit to wander homeless and defenceless, vulnerable as a snail without its shell. A lost soul. Mel had never had to deal with such a dilemma. She had heard of it happening extremely rarely. Nevertheless, such things were not to be ignored or made light of.

Knowing the occult to be a potentially dangerous place, Mel was in no doubt that this was nowhere for a child to wander at will. It posed no fears for Mel, but then she was a shrewd cookie, an old soul who had been around the unseen world since long before she had been born. Nobody outside her closest circle of practising psychics had ever heard her talk about this side of her work. Just as a priest never admits to tapping into the power of the occult to anyone but his fellow clergy, a good medium keeps her counsel. It had been Mel’s experience that as soon as she started to explain her beliefs beyond the safe shallows of clairvoyance and healing, the shutters slammed down and she would be declared a “nutter”. This did not worry her; her spiritual skin had grown thick and fitted her well, but she was tired of explaining herself to a brick wall of scepticism. Better to go only as far as she could be followed, then leave the disbelievers behind to travel on alone. She had nothing to lose. If at the end of the day she was proved right then she would be laughing. Should it transpire that she had been wrong, then the joke would be on her and she would still be the one laughing. Mel never took her self too seriously.

So when young Jenny came to her with her story, Mel was intrigued but unsure how to approach it. It occurred to her that it might take her into realms of which she had little or no experience. She had no doubt about the truth of the existence of the Marchants. That was clearly documented. But as she understood it, Jenny was claiming that the spirit of Harriet was alive and well and living at Beckmans. The existence of a spirit was not the problem. She had already encountered the entity that had possessed Jenny and had previously taken over Liz. But that was the spirit of a child. In Mel’s experience a spirit that remained earthbound took the same form it manifested at the time of its physical death. Jenny was claiming knowledge of an older woman, one who was aging in real time and could effect physical change. Never before had Mel been offered such compelling evidence of interaction between the physical and spirit worlds. In her experience, a spirit might work through a living being but had no power to manifest actual physical phenomena, apart from the odd twitch of a curtain or a clock stopping and starting. To believe Jenny’s story she would have to revise her whole philosophy. The project excited her. And should it prove to be beyond her capabilities she could always call in the help of a more experienced medium. Either way, it was thrilling.

First, Jenny described how she had met Harriet. She talked about their shared passion for music and how Harriet had been training her voice to prepare her for the Royal College of Music once she left school. Mel could accept all this. Guides from the world of spirit often worked through others, sometimes altruistically helping a kindred spirit and sometimes to satisfy their own thwarted ambitions. Mel was convinced that Liz was receiving guidance with her painting and there was no reason to doubt Jenny was being helped too. It was Jenny’s insistence that Harriet Marchant was her tutor that Mel found difficult to accept. It was her opinion that all the research, the wealth of facts Jenny had accumulated about this family, had filled her head. She was obsessed with Harriet, rather than being possessed by her.

The outcome was disappointing. No matter how Mel put it, Jenny knew she did not believe in her Harriet. It was not enough to describe her as a spirit. Surely, Jenny argued, we are all spirits but some of us have bodies too. Harriet was a real, tangible person. As far as Jenny was concerned Harriet was no different from herself. But Mel made it clear that she could not accept this. She resolutely clung to her conviction that Harriet was a projection of Jenny rather than someone who existed independently. For someone who had sat with her and spoken with her, had sung with her, been held by her and held her in return, this was not at all satisfactory. Jenny concluded that Mel might as well call Harriet an imaginary friend and have done with it. Jenny’s opinion of Mel plummeted. But then, thinking back, there had been the business with the Tarot. Those last three cards had obviously been chosen by and for Harriet. If she could see that then surely a trained medium would have. The Page of Cups was poor little David, a fish out of water, desperate to communicate. The ferryman who carried them out to meet their fate was describing Harriet’s accident, not hers. Death took one of the children while the other drifted alone throughout life, waiting for a chance to find hope and redemption. The Five of Cups was Harriet, who else? The homecoming, the inheritance: it was all there plainly for everyone to see - if one chose to look. The cards can be read in many ways and they can lead away from the truth if one dares not face it. Jenny decided it was time to tell the whole family the truth about the accident exactly as she remembered it. They could hardly dare to deny Harriet’s existence then.

O
nly Jenny and Harriet had ventured near the lake or the boathouse since the accident and the
Olly Ro
still drifted free of tethered ropes or moorings. Three months had passed and the storm would have been long forgotten had it not been for the near-drowning of the twins. All the murkiness had gone, leaving the lake and stream clear and innocent. A few ducks had returned to the safety of their island, dismayed to find their house in ruins. The water level remained abnormally high for weeks and when it finally subsided, the silt left behind on the bridge and the decking bore testament to the heights it had reached. Debris littered the far bank and there was a large muddy slick on the near side. Today the boathouse stood out against the sunshine, a couple of loose tiles being the only sign of any storm. There was an eerie stillness in the air, which mirrored the atmosphere of the little party gathered on the walkway beyond the bridge. The Pote remained in the house. Since all the drama he had taken himself off to the security of the armchair in the small sitting-room, seizing the opportunity whenever he found the door open.

“How do you guys want me to do this?” Jenny had assembled her mother and father, and James down by the boathouse. It was one week before Liz’s exhibition and she was alarmed to be retracing a nightmare that, she felt, was best forgotten. The children had been reluctant to talk about it when it had seemed the obvious thing to do. Now the drama had died down, surely it was wise to leave it there, buried in the mud, where that wretched boat belonged too. No, Liz was convinced they should all look forward, face the engine, as her father used to say. Actually she was terrified of what might be dragged up. Inquests were morbid affairs best avoided. However, she could not ignore Jenny’s request. Maybe there were issues her daughter needed to face and although Jenny had made a remarkable recovery, she had never talked about her experience, which was odd. It also left the nagging fear that the trauma could emerge as an emotional crisis at a later point in time. Better to deal with it now, once and for all. So Liz gathered with the others to listen to Jenny’s story. A part of her was curious to know exactly what had happened on that awful night, nevertheless it was with some trepidation that she listened as Jenny began. Liz watched her daughter stand up tall and take a deep breath to compose herself. She felt amazingly proud of her children, especially Jenny. Her strength was phenomenal. Her voice was deep and there was an air of confidence about her that had only become apparent since the trauma of the accident had lifted. She described the night in graphic detail with no hint of fear or doubt. The squabbles in the attic were not touched on, nor James’s refusal to wear his life-jacket. She concentrated on the accident itself, which she relayed with an eerie detachment and faultless accuracy. She described how she had wanted to turn back and how it was only at that point that she realized she had lost control of the boat. She told how one minute James was standing in the bow and the next he was gone. As she spoke, the full horror of the night was relayed, clearly and without emotion, almost as though she was watching a film.

Her family listened, amazed at the fluency with which she recalled the events of that dreadful night. Her rescue attempts, her fight for air, her lungs bursting and burning as the last atom of oxygen expired; the darkness and the freezing water; the agony of thinking her brother was lost. This was not the relaying of a child’s experience. This was a studied heartfelt account by an eyewitness of maturity and understanding, which belied Jenny’s ten short years of life. When she had finished she turned to the boathouse and a glimmer of a smile flickered across her pale drawn face.

“How did you get James out, Jenny?” her father asked gently, probing not challenging.

“She pulled him out.” The sudden use of the third person was baffling. Liz and Edward began to feel uncomfortable, listening to this vulnerable child speaking with such detached control. It was as though by distancing herself from the whole ghastly business she could release her memory without reliving the pain.

Liz wanted to call a halt to the proceedings when Edward posed another question. “I don’t understand, darling. If you and James were in the water, how did you, or ‘she’, pull him out?”

Jenny paused, thinking hard. She closed her eyes to remember in more detail. This time she spoke with considerable emotion. Again she told of the cold, the blackness of the water recounting flashbacks that brought her near to drowning. The searing pain in her lungs and ears the voice calling to her from where they stood now. It all flooded out. Harriet, the boat hook… she freed herself of every detail. When she had finished she was drained. Her hair stuck to her head, wet with perspiration, and her young body shook with spasms, causing her to gasp for breath. Red-hot tears streamed from her eyes and she clung to the rail as she sobbed. Her parents sat transfixed. Liz’s thoughts were racing.
Why is Jenny talking as if all this happened to someone else? Has she concocted this bizarre rescue story to ease her feelings of guilt? Survivors can feel very guilty. Why didn’t we do this with the help of professionals? What if Jenny has a relapse? And what is this nonsense about a boat hook? What boat hook? Why on earth did we drag all this up again?

Suddenly Liz was back standing on the bank beneath the willow. The weeping child was there too, only now she was taller and wore a long black cloak. The two were becoming fused in her mind. Were they one and the same? Was one her daughter and the other herself? The long, black shadow was casting its misery over everything. It had to be stopped before it was too late. Again she felt the emptiness, the total absence of love that she felt the day they raised the first horrid boat. Were there two boats or just one? To her they had merged until they were one and the same. She could no longer separate the past from the present. What was it Jenny said about the cards, something about time being all the same? Was this what Jenny felt now? It did not need a mother’s instinct to know her daughter was in pain. This brave girl was being left to face these horrors alone, feeling abandoned by the one person who should be there whatever. A real mother gave her children the strength and comfort they needed, unconditionally and unbidden. How could she refuse to believe in Jenny’s friend, this Harriet woman? She was obviously very real to her daughter? All this raced through Liz’s brain at the speed of a dream. She scooped Jenny into her arms, hugging her until they lay in a heap not knowing whether they were crying or laughing.