Fragrance of a Rose, Part 2

This is a series. Read Part 1 first.

At the rear of the house lies another porch, larger than the one in front. There is no back yard to speak of, only more trees and the deepening shadow of woodland. The back door opens, and Brad steps out onto the porch, followed by Terry Ann. 

“Come on inside, Babe,” he says, and his eyes have an excited light about them that she recognizes. It’s nice, he mouths to her, unseen by the realtor behind him. 

“These are lilacs,” says Terry Ann, walking to one corner of the porch where more leafless shrubbery stretches well above the roof line. “I know because I have tons of them in my yard. Come May, these’ll be full of flowers, and the whole place will smell like lilacs.”

“How much of this land comes with the house?” asks Rebecca.

“You’ve got the barn on the other side, and this field over here.” Terry Ann points toward the meadow. “Did you see the rose trellises? At least, the listing agent told me they were rose trellises. There were gardens there, and past the stone wall, she rented out the field to a local farmer. He grew alfalfa for hay, you know? There’s a tractor entrance down at the far end.” 

Terry Ann shields her eyes against the falling snow. “The property goes back into the woods here. It’s about six acres. There’s a survey map inside. We can take a look.”

The electricity is on, but the water pipes have been drained to avoid freezing, and there’s no heat inside. The back door opens onto a large kitchen, and it’s cold — icebox-cold. Breath streams out in gray plumes. They keep their coats buttoned up and their hats and gloves on.

The room appears to have been last updated in the fifties. The realtor sign-in sheet and a blue-inked survey map sit on an ancient formica-topped table. Hideous linoleum tiles, turned the jaundiced yellow of old cooking grease, cover the floor, their edges curling up like tongues. 

But there are lots of pretty cabinets made of some dark, knotty wood, and over by the big double sink and the old six-burner gas stove stands a real, honest-to-gosh butcher block work table.

“You could turn this into a real nice country kitchen,” says Terry Ann, toeing at a linoleum flap with her boot. “And look at the size of the pantry over there.”

Brad points out the back staircase as they pass into a hallway with aged hardwood flooring. The living room is large and rustic, with more exposed wide boards on the floor. Protruding from a huge creek stone hearth is a big black wood stove. Various pieces of furniture — some of it antique-looking, some of it just ratty — fill the space. 

“I believe they plan to auction off the contents.” Terry Ann plunks a sour note on an old upright piano in one corner, then runs her gloved finger up the keys. “But if you see anything you like, I’m sure it’s negotiable, if you want to put in an offer.”

Brad looks at Rebecca again, and that yes, we like it energy passes silently between them. 

Even unoccupied, unheated, and colder inside than out, the house has a hum of personality that newer, more fashionable houses always seem to lack. “Character”, the realtors like to call it. They know “character” makes up for any number of the deficits that old houses inevitably have.

The three of them tour the first floor, then the basement, where yes indeed, there are hand-hewn beams, bluestone walls, an actual shelf of bedrock that juts out from one corner, and supporting posts that are little more than trees with their branches sawn off.

Back in the kitchen, Brad sits at the table and begins to study the survey map. Rebecca ascends the back staircase, leaving Brad and Terry Ann to try to fathom the boundaries of the property.

The back stairs are narrow and steep, and end in a kind of alcove that recesses into the wall on one side. It’s an odd space — too small for a respectable set of shelves or to wall off as a closet, but large enough to feel wasted, left empty as it is. It looks, Rebecca thinks, like the sort of place that a child would hide. 

It’s easy to tell which room had been the old woman’s bedroom. Its windows look out to the meadow and the gardens below. A bare mattress rests on an old brass four poster, with a wooden crucifix on the wall over its head. A large, freestanding wardrobe fills the wallspace across from it, a common sight in these old farmhouses built without closets. 

A night table sits by the bed, and near that a bureau with drawers and a mirror. These are cluttered with objects: a hand mirror, brushes and combs, small trays with costume jewelry, keys, coins. A well-worn Bible sits with a rosary on top of it. 

The room looks as though somebody had just gone away for the weekend. 

Rebecca feels an odd sadness filling her — the sadness of stranger’s lives, of those forgotten. She crosses the room to the window. Dead flies, desiccated ladybugs, and ragged flaps of cobweb lay atop the wooden frame. Beyond the slightly warped glass, the snow rushes by in the fading light, slanting down like twisting streamers of dull foil. 

On the ground, the snow is obliterating boundaries, distorting shapes. The stone wall has become a mound of white; the trellises a looming shadow. It takes a moment for Rebecca to realize that someone is standing out there — standing in the snow-covered garden next to the latticework frame that in the summertime will be bejeweled with roses.

The person is a woman, Rebecca can now see. But she’s not Terry Ann — at least, she’s not wearing Terry Ann’s puffy blue down-filled parka. In fact, she isn’t wearing a coat at all. 

She’s wearing a dress, something almost Victorian, with puffy sleeves and lace and a long skirt that reaches the ground. The woman’s unfashionably long hair hangs around her shoulders. She appears unmindful of the streaming snowfall she stands in. 

Rebecca leans closer to the glass, trying to get a clearer view. The woman stands motionless, facing the trellis in the frozen garden. There is something disturbing in the way she stands there — a weariness, a lack of vitality. She seems tired and worn out. She raises her arm to the trellis, empty to Rebecca’s eyes of anything but leafless vines. 

Rebecca feels a little jump in her chest,and her breath catches in her throat as she realizes she’s witnessing something extraordinary. Rebecca wonders where she came from, this apparition, this figure of weary, diminished light. 

Then she realizes that it is she herself who is the true intruder, as she stands in the chilly house with her own big puffy down coat and high lace-up insulated boots. She feels as though she has suddenly imposed herself upon this woman’s world.

The woman in the garden seems to pause for a moment, then she turns and lifts her face to the window as though she feels Rebecca’s gaze upon her. The woman holds a spot of color in her hand — a yellow rose. The blossom is almost incandescent in the blue-gray of the late-day snowfall.

Rebecca can’t make out the woman’s face, but she nonetheless feels that small spark of eye contact, that connection by line-of-sight. Slowly, Rebecca raises her gloved hand in hesitant greeting.

The woman stands terribly still for a long moment. Then the blossom falls to her feet, and she raises her hands to her face. Although Rebecca cannot hear, she knows — by the hunched shoulders and shuddering spasms wracking the body — that the woman is sobbing violently, possessed by some terrible, consuming grief.

***

Rebecca often wonders, over the years, if part of wanting the house was wanting to discover the source of that terrible grief, to solve the mystery of the woman’s pain. 

She feels so close to it sometimes, as though all that unhappiness lay just on the other side of a thin wall of thought, the way a dream sometimes hides behind the mundane concerns of life. But it’s an unhappiness whose source is some sinister knowledge, something that would have been better left festering in the dark. 

Some things should never be dragged into the light of day. 

Of the three different visitations, it turns out that the most frequent is the Wandering Woman. The Wandering Woman sometimes slips down the hallway upstairs, then just as suddenly will be seen moving through the trees in the woods out back. 

She has no purpose to her movement, no goal to her wanderings. Like everything Rebecca knows about the ghosts, she knows this too, in some intuitive way that can’t be explained in words. The Wandering Woman has gone beyond searching, beyond desire. She has no more sense of purpose than a bit of ash drifting up from a campfire. 

Over time, Rebecca comes to understand that the Wandering Woman carries the same burden of pain as the Sobbing Woman, only she bears it with a stillness, like a deep chill that has embedded itself into her bones. 

Sometimes, the appearance of the Wandering Woman seems to be an explanation in and of itself. That in some way, her very presence speaks of a world where nothing has any meaning any more, where the sense of things that hold the world together have unraveled like the stitches on an old, worn out rag doll. 

On those days, Rebecca feels dangerously close to understanding the despair that ties the Sobbing Woman, the Wandering Woman, and the Mad Thing together. 

***

The more she pays attention to the ghosts, the more they appear in her life. 

This is how it works, she supposes. Our thoughts are like magnets, attracting the opposite poles, repelling like from like. What you attract is not the light you give off. What you attract, Rebecca now understands, is the shadow that you cast with that light. 

Here is my shadow; She is Three. 

She is communing with them in some way, making herself a part of their circle. She is opening her eyes to their darkness. 

Knowledge is sorrow; this is the lesson of the Fall. 

At the top of the back staircase, the Mad Thing crouches in the alcove. Rebecca doesn’t try to look. She knows better than that now. She simply pauses and lets herself feel the presence, in the air, on her skin.

What is it that’s hurting you so? Rebecca thinks, and for just a moment, she gets a piece of the answer. The world explodes, opens up, and a massive rush of energy fills the air until she’s drowning in it. It’s a picture of Nothing, the world through the Mad Thing’s eyes. Nothing. The Void. To live with such empty meaninglessness, always, who wouldn’t be driven mad?

At the bottom of the stairs, Rebecca stops and looks back up. Already what has happened is gone from her mind. She doesn’t even remember coming down. But there is a dizzying, whirling sensation inside of her, and she knows that something amazing and terrifying has just occurred. Her face is wet with tears. Her hands are trembling. 

Is this what it’s like to be noticed by a spirit? Is this the language in which they speak? How long would it take before one is drawn completely through to some Other Side? Is this what it’s like, to commune with ghosts?

***

Rebecca is dreaming of a great, whirling spiral that approaches in the air from far, far away.  As it gets closer, she can see that at the center of the spiral is an eye -– not a human eye, but an eye with a vast awareness nonetheless. 

Then she sees that at the end of each spiral arm, there is also an eye — a smaller version of the one at the center. And then, Rebecca realizes that she herself is drifting at the end of a long, spiral trail, flowing out from the eye at the center.

She awakes in darkness, but her vision adjusts quickly because outside the window, the moon is full and high. Brad sleeps, unaware of any turmoil taking place in the ether that surrounds him. 

Rebecca puts on a robe and goes down the back staircase and out onto the back porch. It’s late summer, and the lilacs are long gone for this year — she’s seen five flowerings of the lilacs since they moved in. The night air is raucous with the cacophony of crickets. 

She is not in the least surprised when she sees the Wandering Woman moving through the trees in the moonlight. Rebecca takes the flashlight they keep on the back porch and follows the Wandering Woman into the woods. Perhaps, Rebecca thinks, tonight is the night we’ll both find what we’re looking for. 

…To be continued…

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