Head Cases Part 4

Tricia's eyes widened.

"Oh, don't worry, the Martins are long gone from there. Come along, I'll show you."

Mrs. Tanser led Tricia through a hallway and a long, dark sitting room to a white door. She turned a latch and a metal bolt clacked audibly before she turned the old round k.n.o.b.

They stepped through into a small, dark room. It had no windows at all, but still was lit. The sun beamed in through hairline cracks in the grout between the stones that had been shaved and stacked to form the addition. Shadows played like anxious ghosts on the walls and dust motes rained in lazy dances as the wind shifted and groaned outside.

"This is it," Mrs. Tanser said. "The infamous White room. They think that Mr. White built it with his own hands, and used the bones of his wife and son as the grout between the rocks. Mrs. Martin followed his lead. The paint you see in here? The reason the room is so white? She ground up the bones of those two kids after carving them up for lunchmeat here in this room. She used the dust of their bones to paint this room an everlasting off-white."

Tricia stared in horror at the walls. "The paint isatheir bones?"

Mrs. Tanser nodded. "It seemed a sacrilege to paint over the remains of those poor souls, so the room has been left exactly as it was when Pastor Martin sat down here in the middle of the room and a wellathere's no delicate way to put this. He blew his brains out with a hunting rifle. Lord knows where he got it, a man of the clergy and all. Someone wiped down the ceiling and wall over therea" She pointed to a shadowy stain to their right.

"But all in all, the bones of those children are still right here, chalky and white, for anyone to see.

"Oh my dear, you're trembling; you're white as the walls. Come here, I'm so sorry. I'm an old woman and talk too much. I forget myself. And you, just a 10th grader and all. Let's have us a soda pop, hmmm?"

Mrs. Tanser pulled the wide-eyed girl from the room and bolted the lock once again.

"Don't need any of those summer breezes or restless ghosts getting in," she mumbled, and then shook her head. "Darn it all, there I go again."

The ma.s.sive door opened with a long squeak. Mrs. Tanser peered through the foot-wide opening with a suspicious look on her face. Then her eyes lighted on the tousled hair of Tricia.

"You're probably here to see my nieces, aren't you?" she asked.

The girl shook her head. "No, ma'am. I don't know them."

"Don't know them?" Mrs. Tanser looked confused. Then she slapped a palm to her forehead. "My oh my, that's right. They came a-visiting awhile before you came a-visiting. And you've been too polite to correct an old woman before."

She opened the door wider and motioned Tricia inside. "Sometimes it's all a blur," she confided, and pushed the door shut.

"I remember now. I've been giving you the history of the house, and fattening you up on apples. Not the best choice for fattening, I'll give you, but it's what I have. No chocolate cakes up here on the hill!"

Mrs. Tanser motioned her into the kitchen.

"Where were we last time? I told you about the Whites and the MartinsaThere were others, too. But then in the *50s, they turned the place into an orphanage."

Mrs. Tanser laughed. "I know, it sounds ridiculous. A house where children kept dying in horrible ways. A house where children's bones actually painted the walls whitea"and they turned it into an orphanage. But there you go. I wonder if they ever even saw the irony."

The rhythmic sound of a knife on stone filled the kitchen as Mrs. Tanser cut the girl an apple.

"Here we go," the older woman said, pushing a plate in front of the girl. She stared at the ceiling a moment and then grinned and nodded. "Forty-seven."

Mrs. Tanser scooped the core of the apple and a couple seeds from the counter and threw them in a waste can. "Forty-seven children in all disappeared while this house was an orphanage. That's what I found out down there at the village hall. G.o.d knows why the town didn't have this place bulldozed, but, then again, who cares so much about orphans?"

The old woman shook her head in obvious disgust and then motioned for Tricia to follow her.

"Grab an apple," she said. "I want to show you something."

Mrs. Tanser led the way past the dining room and a dark hallway and the horrible room of bone paint, with its locked door. She stopped at another door, this one painted dark as a 2 a.m. shadow.

She pulled a ring of keys from the depths of her ap.r.o.n and explained, "Sometimes at night, I hear voices from in here. Terrible voices. Men howling. Children screaming. When I open the door, they're never there...but I keep it locked anyway."

She pushed the door open and stepped inside. Tricia followed, though hesitantly.

The room expanded to fill the eye with a vista of beautiful stonework and a floor of intricate mosaic. Like most of the house, the predominant color was no color. The room hurt the eye in its melding of cream and vanilla and starving, emaciated white. It also ascended three stories in the air and ran as deep as a football field.

"Over here," Mrs. Tanser called, and led Tricia to a corner. She reached down to the floor and pulled on a small cord that poked out from beneath the shards of tile. A hidden trap door opened upwards at her pull.

"Look," Mrs. Tanser pointed, and Tricia leaned in to stare down into the gap. The trap secreted a small cubbyhole, maybe 18 inches deep and a foot wide. Its bottom was hidden by dozens of small white pebble-like shards. They covered the bottom and stacked on top of each other like a pound of gravel.

"Hold out your hand," Mrs. Tanser said. As Tricia did, her arm visibly shook.

The older woman squeezed her outstretched palm and grinned. "It's okay. They can't get you here. There time was a long time ago. Now. You see these?" She turned the girl's hand palm side up and ran a finger across the top joint, on the other side of the fingernail.

"I'm not sure what they intended, but I believe that little stack of bones down there are the top joints of all those missing orphans' fingers."

Tricia ripped her hand away and gasped.

Mrs. Tanser shook her head. "They say down in town that those orphans disappeared, but it's no mystery where they went."

She let the trap fall down with a smack that echoed through the too-still room.

"Just look around you," she said and gestured at the intricately laid floor. "Those kids never left this room. Their bones are here, laid into the walls and the floor and the ceiling. Those kids built this room."

Tricia's eyes had now widened so large that the whites of her eyes were circled in red.

"Yep," the old woman sighed. "You're standing on them."

The girl screamed.

"Just bones," Mrs. Tanser said. "I wanted you to see, to understand. This house has a bad reputation, and rightly so. I'm sure those voices I hear coming from this room are from all those innocent orphans who had their fingers cropped off, and their bones ground down to shards of decorative tile."

"It's this house," she said and shook her head, pulling Tricia closer. The girl didn't fight her embrace. All she could think of was that she was standing on the chopped-up bones of dead people.

"Everyone who's ever lived here has felt the need to add to the house," Mrs. Tanser said, and pulled the girl towards the back of the long room.

"The White House was large by the standards of the 1800s when Mr. White built it, but there have been many rooms added since. I showed you the draughty room last time you were here. And this rooma"which I think was probably a gymnasium for the orphansa"was built over a long period. There are others. In the bas.e.m.e.nt is a small closet that I believe was painted in the paste of a child...its colors are faded and dulled now, but it looks to be a mad swirl of mud and blood and bone if you stare closely. There's a shed on the back of the property that has window frames that are rounded and made of what looks to be rib bones. And the lock on that shed is a primitive thing, but it seems to be made of an arm or a leg bone that drops into place and holds the door fast.

"There's no way the realtor could have warned me," Mrs. Tanser said. "There's no way she could ever really have knowna"she wouldn't even stand inside this house. I wish she could have told me what I was in for. But the house...once you're here..."

They walked across the long bone mosaic room, and the chatter of Tricia's teeth began to reverberate through the silence.

"It's okay, child," Mrs. Tanser said. "I just want to show you one more room."

At the back of the long white room she stopped, and reached out to turn the latch on a door that only announced itself as thin seams set in the wall. It opened outward at her touch, and a cool breeze hit them as it did.

"I think that some of the rooms people added to the house were afraid to show their real colors," Mrs. Tanser said. "The people knew what they were doing, on some level, and they bleached the bones and carved the bones and crushed the bones into paste and mortar and paint.

"But when the house told me...when I realized what I would have to do, I made a pledge to myself to be true to the children who came here. The people who grew this house. They shouldn't be hidden in pieces, I said to myself, but celebrated. After all, every thing has its place. And every place, its thing. The things that build this house have their place. They had life, and in death...they grow the White House in rooms of bone.

"And this house...must have its thing. These days...that's me."

Mrs. Tanser picked up a hammer and raised it above Tricia's head. She breathed deep as the girl squealed and tried desperately to run. Her screams rang out like bullets sc.r.a.ping metal. But Mrs. Tanser's other hand held the small girl fast. A trapped animal.

"You'll live here forever," she promised. "And I promise you'll hardly feel a thing. I can't believe the torture some of these kids must have gone through. I could never be so cruel."

Tricia screamed again. A horrible, larynx-shredding sound. But she couldn't break free of the old woman's grip. Mrs. Tanser lived only for the house now, and Tricia had never felt such desperate strength before. The veins of the woman's hands stood out blue and serious above the small girl's reddening fingers. "I came to this town because I loved children. Genna and Jillie didn't want to stay here either," she whispered. "Look at them up there." She nodded at two tiny skulls shrieking in silence on the wall. "But what could I do? I adore children. The house...This house...it never relents..."

"Hold still," Mrs. Tanser said. "I want your face to stay this beautiful, always."

Tricia twisted and turned, staring at the bone-white eye sockets and jaws of the handful of splintered skulls that lined the half-constructed wall of the small room like fractured masks. Those perfect, unblemished bone faces screamed silently in chorus with her, as Mrs. Tanser turned to make her kill.

"It's going to take a long time to finish this room," the old woman lamented. "But I will finish my room. Everything has its place. And every place, its thing. This room is mine."

She brought the hammer down.

HEAL THYSELF.

By Scott Nicholson.

Jeffrey Jackson peeked over the top of the magazine. His eyes went to the clock on the wall. Had it really been only four minutes since he'd last looked?

His hands shook, so he put the magazine aside before the pages started flapping. Every session with Dr. Edelhart left him calm for a day or two, fists unclenched, the red behind his eyelids dulled to brown. But always the raging night crawled out on its belly, fingers tickled his brain, his cabbies got radio messages from Mars, and sweaty, dark figures flitted along the perimeter of his dreams. And in the mirror he saw the man he had once been. Those last days leading up to the next session were a cold turkey of the soul.

Jackson wondered if what he'd read were true, that patients became more addicted to therapy than they ever could to drugs. He gripped the arms of the waiting room chair, palms slick on the vinyl. He tried one of the relaxation techniques that Dr. Edelhart had taught him. That wallpaper pattern, reproduced a thousand times in the expanse of the room. If Jackson crossed his eyes slightly....

No good. He settled on watching the receptionist, who pretended to be busy with paperwork. She was white and almost pretty, but Jackson no longer had much interest in the opposite s.e.x. Or any s.e.x, for that matter.

He started from his chair when the buzzer rang. The receptionist gave him a two o'clock smile and said, "Dr. Edelhart will see you now."

Why did the doctor never have an appointment before Jackson's? If only Jackson could see another patient walk out of Dr. Edelhart's office, face rosy with beat.i.tude. Perhaps that would give Jackson hope of being healed. He crossed the room and, as always, reached the door just as it swung open.

Dr. Edelhart smiled broadly, teeth bright against his wide, dark face. He extended his hand. Jackson wiped his own hand on his pants leg and shook Edelhart's. Prelude to The Ritual.

"How are you, Jeffrey?" The same question as always.

You know d.a.m.ned good and well how I am, Doc. You've shrunk my brain and cracked open my past and put every little memory under your magnifying gla.s.s. Walked me back to my childhood. Into the womb, even. And beyond.

Way beyond.

Jackson blinked, barely able to meet the taller man's eyes. "I...I'm doing fine."

He brushed past the doctor, headed for the security of the familiar stuffed chair. Edelhart didn't believe in the couch. He was too post-Freudian for that. Edelhart was of the New High Church, a dash of Jung, a pinch of Skinner, and equal portions of new age-right action-spirit releas.e.m.e.nt-astral projection-veda dharmic-divine starpath to inner beingness. Add water and stir.

Edelhart's mental porridge cost $150 an hour, and Jackson considered it a bargain. He settled in the chair as Edelhart closed the door and adjusted the window shades. Since the office was on the seventh floor, the traffic sounds below were muted. Jackson was almost able to forget his fear of cars. And windows. And the faces on either side of them.

Jackson closed his eyes. Edelhart's chair squeaked behind his polished mahogany desk. The room had an aroma of carpet cleaner and sweat. Or maybe Jackson was smelling his own panic. He tried to breath deeply and evenly, but he was too aware of his racing heartbeat. And the past, where he would soon be headed.

"So, where were we, Jeffrey?" The doctor's voice was deep, resonant, a soul-singer's pipes. Even this familiar question took on a musical quality, a sonorous ba.s.s. Or maybe he was stereotyping. After all, not every black had the rid'dem.

"We were..." Jackson swallowed. "Going back."

Jackson didn't have to look to visualize the doctor's head gravely nodding. "Ah, yes," said Dr. Edelhart. The shuffling of papers, a quick perusal of notes, Jackson's round peg of a head being fitted into this square hole and that triangular niche. "So you've accepted that present life conflicts and traumas can have their roots in past lifetimes?"

"Of course, Doctor." Jackson was too eager to please and too afraid to do otherwise. "Especially that one past life."

"We each have at least one bad former life, Jeffrey. Otherwise, there would be no reason to live again. Nothing to resolve."

Jackson wanted to ask which of the doctor's past lives were the most haunting. But of course that was wrong. Dr. Edelhart was the one behind the desk, the one with the pencil. He was the doctor, for Christ's sake. The answer man. The black dude delivering The Word to the square honky.

Sheesh, no wonder you're on the teeter brink of b.u.mblef.u.c.k crazy. Starting to shrink the SHRINK. And this guy's the only thing standing between you and a rubber room. Good thing dear Dr. Edelhart doesn't believe in medication, or you'd be on a brain salad of Prozac, Thorazine, lithium, Xanax, Xanadu, whatever.

No, the only drug that Edelhart believed in was plain and simple holism. Jackson's soul fragments were all over the place, in both s.p.a.ce and time. Edelhart was the shaman, the quest leader, the spirit guide. His job was to take Jackson to those far corners of the universe where the fragments were buried or broken. Once the fragments were recovered, then all it took was a little psychic superglue and Jackson would "Become Authentic."

Jackson just wished Edelhart would hurry the h.e.l.l up. Seven months of regression therapy and they were just now getting to the good stuff. The tongue in the sore tooth. The fly in the ointment. The nail in the karmic wheel. The past life that pain built.

"I'm ready to go all the way," Jackson said, surer now. After all, what was a century-and-a-half of forgotten existence compared to thirty-plus years of real, remembered anxiety?

"Okay, Jeffrey. Breathe, count down from ten, your eyes are closed and looking through the ceiling, past the sky, past the long night above..."

Jackson could handle this. He fell into the meditation with practiced ease, and by the time the doctor reached "Seven, a gate awakens," Jackson was swaddled in the tender arms of a hypnotic trance. He scarcely heard Dr. Edelhart's feet approaching across the soft carpet. The doctor's breath was like a sea breeze on his cheek, the deep voice quieter now.

"You're on the plantation, Jeffrey. The wheat is golden, the cotton fields rolling out like a blanket of snow. The oaks are in bloom, the air sweet with the ripeness of the earth. Somebody's frying chicken in the main house. The sun is Carolina hot but it will go down soon."

Jackson smiled, distantly, drowsily. The Doc was good. It was almost like the man was there himself, simultaneously living Jackson's past life. But Jackson had described this scene so well, it was seared so deeply into his subconsciousness, that it was no wonder Dr. Edelhart could almost watch it like a movie.

Part of Jackson knew he was half-dreaming, that he was actually sitting in a chair in a Charlotte high rise. But the image was vivid, the farm spread out around him, the boots heavy on his feet, the smell of horses drifting from the barn, a cool draft on his neck from the creek. This wasn't real, but it was. He was this farmer, edging along the fence line, poking along the rim of the cornfield.

Past visits to this past life had made it familiar.

He was Dell Bedford, Southern gentleman, landowner, a colonel in the Tryon militia. Because they all knew Lincoln and them Federalist hogwashers were going to try to muscle the South back into the Union. But what Lincoln and his boot-licker McLellan didn't figure on was that the Confederate States of America might have other plans.

The nerve of that Lincoln, telling them what to do with their n.i.g.g.e.rs.

Jackson swallowed hard, back in the modern padded chair, sweat ringing his scalp line. This part bothered him. He wasn't a racist, not anymore, not now. He'd voted against Jesse Helms, he supported illegal immigrants. He even saw a black therapist. He was cool with it all, brotherhood of man, harmony of one people.

But he had no proof that he hadn't once been Dell Bedford, slave master and arrogant white swine. How could he deny the word "n.i.g.g.e.r" that sat on his tongue, ready to be spat over and over again, a sick well of hate that never ran dry? He was Dell, or had been, or...

"Are you there, Jeffrey?" came Dr. Edelhart's voice. Decades away, yet right on the plantation with him, like a bee hovering around his ear.