Help for the Haunted by John Searles Read Free Book Online

Rose whispered.
    â€œI don’t think it’s pret—”
    Rose yanked me into the hall. “Don’t blow this with your big mouth. Whether you like it or not, you’re going to help me, Sylvie.”
    â€œNo, I won’t.”
    But Rose ducked into my room, returning with the pages of my freshly typed essay in her hands. “ ‘The Aftereffects of Martin Luther King Jr.’s Assassination on American Society,’ by Sylvie Mason,” she read. “Bet you’d hate to see all your hard work go tumbling toward obsolescence too.”
    I reached for the paper, but she pulled back.
    â€œCareful.” Rose gave a little tear to the title page, the sound causing me to wince. “Oops. Are you sure you don’t want to help me?”
    I looked away, into my parents’ room. Their beds perfectly made, their bedspreads the swirling colors of a leaf pile. That rope, stretching between my mother’s bedpost and the bathroom door. From the other side, the sounds of Dot splashing about, making those hapless bubbling noises. I turned to Rose. “What do I have to do?”
    The question was as good as a yes—we both knew it. My sister did an about-face and headed downstairs without answering. I followed until we were standing in the kitchen at the door to the basement. Our parents had only recently moved their workspace from the living room to below, so the place didn’t hold the same fear that would come later. Even so, I avoided it. But Rose pulled open the door and descended the wooden steps. Again, I followed, breathing in the musty air and gazing around at the cinder-block walls. In one corner, the beginnings of a partition separated a small area by the sliding glass door. My father had long ago begun constructing those walls, only to give up on the project. Through the sloppy cage of two-by-fours and snarled wires, I watched as my sister navigated among the heap of bicycles, a forgotten dental chair, and on deeper into the shadows.
    While she did who knew what over there, I studied my father’s new desk and file cabinet, a compact TV and VCR on top. A hulking bookshelf had been positioned in front of the cavity in the wall that led to the crawl space, the shelves filled with boxes they’d yet to unpack, a basket of cassettes and a tape player, a few stray videotapes. My mother never cared for sitting at a desk, so she kept a wooden rocker there. The cushions tied to the seat and spindled back were worn thin, her knitting basket situated nearby so she could occupy her hands whenever they discussed their work.
    Darkness cannot put out the light.
    It can only make God brighter.
    The words were engraved on a paperweight atop a pile of snapshots. I lifted it and flipped through the photos. A dingy hall in an old hospital. A hillside cemetery, names and dates worn from the stones. Only one photo had I seen before: a run-down theater with an empty marquee. In each, a stray sliver of light or odd shadow turned up. I tucked the photos beneath the paperweight and opened a drawer, where I found a bundle of tarnished dental instruments bound by rubber bands. Probes and explorers, bone files and orthodontic pliers—I knew all their names, because I’d once asked my father.
    â€œDamn it!” Rose shouted from beyond the skeletal partition. “I stepped in a glue trap.”
    That should slow you down, I thought, listening to her foot scrape the floor. “What are you doing over there anyway?”
    â€œJust hold your horses, Sylvie.” She kept scraping. “You’ll see soon enough.”
    I wandered to the bookshelf. Something made me pick up a video, push it in the VCR. A grainy nothingness filled the screen, then my mother appeared. On that fuzzy TV, it felt the way it must glimpsing an image in a crystal ball. She stood outside a brick house in a beige raincoat I’d not seen before, the belt tight around her slender waist. My father’s